Interior Principal Secretary Karanja Kibicho revealed plans to issue Identification Cards to six-year-olds under the Huduma Number programme.
The cards will be known as Minor's Huduma Card with the government set to distribute the Huduma Smart Cards under the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) programme.
Kibicho noted that children will be given a number at birth which will be used to register them for the Minor's Huduma Card when they attain the age of six.
"When you are born you get a birth notification, after which a birth certificate with a number is generated.
"Then at the age of six; you go to school where the Ministry of Education will want to register you under the National Education Management Information System (Nemis) and give you a Nemis Number," he explained.
Kibicho added that the cards are issued to six-year-olds because a child's facial biometrics are already well formed, and can therefore be captured.
The cards will contain a child's unique identifier which will be a number, and will be capped at below 18-years.
Children born after the rollout will receive a unique number at birth that will be used in school registration, registering for a Minor's Card and applying for a National Identify Card.
To access government services, foreigners and refugees will be given different Huduma cards under the programme.
Children aged above six years registered for the Hunduma Number back in 2019 using only their birth certificates and fingerprints.
The government currently issues IDs to persons over the age of 18-years with the requirements currently being an original birth certificate and a photocopy of the birth certificate, the identity cards of your parents and a photocopy of the same, two passport size photos.
Kibicho also explained the delay in issuing of the cards has been occasioned by matching the collected data with existing databases to ascertain the validity of the new registry.
"What we have in our records must match what is in the database 100% for us to be sure that the person who presented him or herself before us is the person we shall admit as a Kenyan.
"There are 90 fingerprints experts working on this, and so far about 14 million of the 37 million data sets have been cleaned up," he added.
