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Kenya launches multi-biometric system for police clearance certificates
Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations upgraded its palm and fingerprint identification system with IDEMIA, adding facial matching and live-scan capture at Huduma Centres.
2026-07-23CC-BY-4.0huduma-centrespolice-clearanceafiskenya
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Key Facts
- The system was deployed across 52 Huduma Centres.
- It combines fingerprint and facial matching with electronic live-scan capture.
- The target is 24-hour processing for police clearance certificates.
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Moving from inked cards to live-scan capture changes the bottleneck from transcription to matching throughput, which is what makes a 24-hour target plausible. Police clearance certificates are a high-volume civil service, so the deployment is closer to citizen infrastructure than to forensic casework.