1. Introduction: From Artificial Intelligence to the Human Face

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly entering public life in Ghana, including through digital systems used for identification, verification and service delivery. The ethical question is therefore not simply what AI can do, but what happens to people when digital systems become gateways through which citizenship, mobility or access to services are recognised. In northern Ghana, especially in border communities, this is a concrete question. I was privilege to visit Pusiga community in November 2025 with a Jesuit friend of my mine who is originally from the community. Thus, the topic for this article resonates very well with me.

The article examines the Pusiga experience in Ghana's Upper East Region, where the National Identification Authority (NIA), in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), undertook a special Ghana Card registration exercise in May-June 2024 for vulnerable populations living along the Ghana-Burkina Faso border who had not been able to register. The case shows how difficult it can be for people whose lives are mobile, documents are incomplete, or identities are socially complex to fit an increasingly data-driven state.

The case should not be described as an AI system autonomously deciding that particular people were not Ghanaian. The evidence concerns a biometric, database-driven national identification system rather than a documented autonomous AI decisionmaker. Yet it exposes a related ethical problem: when access to rights and services depends on how well a person can be represented, verified and classified by digital infrastructure, dignity can become vulnerable to the limits of the data architecture.

2. Pusiga: When Identity Becomes a Digital Question

Pusiga is a border district whose social and economic relationships do not always follow the formal logic of a national boundary. The NIA explained that the special registration exercise was intended to support vulnerable Ghanaian populations in communities straddling the Ghana-Burkina Faso border, enabling more accurate identification, easier border crossing, access to public services and greater security. The idea followed a stakeholder consultation on border security, with IOM proposing the intervention in August 2023; the exercise began on 20 May 2024 and was implemented in phases (National Identification Authority [NIA], 2024a, 2024b).

The Ghana Card is not merely another identity document. NIA states that registration captures personal information, parental and next-of-kin information, documentary evidence and biometrics, including fingerprints, irises, photographs and a signature. The resulting identity can be used for verification in public and private transactions, while NIA links the card to easier access to health, education, communications, insurance and banking services (NIA, 2025a, 2025b).

For people affected by rural isolation, mobility, poverty or gaps in civil registration, this architecture raises a harder question: how does a system recognise someone whose lived identity is strong within a community, but whose documentary identity is weak? Ghanaian law and NIA procedures provide a vouching mechanism: an applicant without a birth certificate or passport may be identified under oath by an eligible relative or, in specified circumstances, by two approved community members (NIA, 2025b).

3. “Am I Not a Ghanaian?” — The Experience of Vulnerable Border Communities

The deepest issue in Pusiga is not simply the possession of a card but the experience of being recognised. A person may belong to a family, participate in the local economy and be known by community authorities, yet still encounter difficulty when the state asks for proof in a prescribed documentary form. The language of a registration database can become narrower than the language of belonging.

IOM's security perception and vulnerability assessment, conducted in northern border communities including Pusiga, Pulmakom and Kulungugu, found uneven relationships between residents and formal institutions. In Pusiga, only 28.2% of respondents reported interactions with an assembly member, while opportunities to discuss concerns with political and administrative authorities were often rare. The assessment also recorded ethnic discrimination in Pusiga at 4.5%, the highest figure among the surveyed communities alongside Namoo (IOM, 2023).

These findings do not prove that the Ghana Card system itself discriminated against a particular ethnic group. They show that a supposedly neutral registration system operates inside a social environment where trust, ethnicity, mobility, documentation, and relations with public institutions already matter. The affected person encounters two forms of recognition: recognition as a member of a community and recognition as a valid record in a national data system.

The available evidence does not provide verified first-person quotations from Pusiga residents about Ghana Card registration. It would therefore be wrong to manufacture testimony. The community's voice is represented here through documented findings from the IOM assessment and the official explanations of why special registration was considered necessary.A publication version requiring direct first-person testimony should add interviews obtained through informed consent.

4. Who Makes the Decision?

Formal authority in the Pusiga case rests primarily with the NIA, which manages the National Identity Register and the process through which personal information and biometrics are captured, checked and used for verification. IOM supported the special exercise, including requesting the intervention and bearing the operational costs of the 2024 pilot (NIA, 2024a, 2024b).

The decision that matters is not necessarily a single automated yes-or-no judgment. It is a cumulative decision structure: which documents count, which information is mandatory, how identities are verified, who may vouch for an applicant, which data are entered into the register, and how a record is subsequently used for authentication. Once these decisions are embedded in digital infrastructure, an individual may experience only the outcome rather than the institutional chain that produced it.

This is where Pusiga connects with wider AI ethics. Data-driven systems are often presented as neutral because they process information consistently. Yet consistency is not the same as justice. A system may process incomplete information perfectly and still produce an unjust practical outcome if the information required is inaccessible to the people being governed by it.

5. Can People Understand or Challenge the System?

NIA procedures contain important safeguards. Applicants are interviewed and assisted with forms; personal information and biometrics are captured; applicants receive a copy of the captured information to review; and errors can be brought to the registration officer for correction before the card is printed. Where documentary evidence is absent, the vouching procedure creates a route to registration (NIA, 2025b).

For a poor or mobile border resident, however, the practical questions are whether the person can understand why a particular document is required, where to go when a record is inaccurate, who can correct it, how long correction takes, and what happens when the first point of contact cannot resolve the matter. A right that exists formally may still be inaccessible because of distance, language, cost, literacy or lack of institutional confidence.

Ghana's national identification architecture is also becoming more consequential. NIA now describes the Ghana Card as a basis for verification and authentication across public and private services, and in 2026 biometric verification rules were strengthened under the National Identity Register (Amendment) Regulations. As digital identity becomes more embedded in everyday transactions, an error or exclusion can have effects well beyond the registration desk (NIA, 2026b).

6. From Exclusion to Community Response

The most constructive feature of the Pusiga experience is that the response did not stop at telling residents to travel farther or acquire more documents. The special registration exercise brought registration services closer to border communities. NIA described it as an effort to expand registration options for vulnerable populations, and a later 2026 programme explicitly built on the 2024 Pusiga pilot by extending special registration to selected communities in the Upper West and Upper East Regions (NIA, 2024b, 2026a).

There is also evidence of a broader move toward community participation in border governance. A Community Engagement and Policing Strategy launched in 2025 was informed by vulnerability surveys and town-hall discussions involving border officials, community members and development partners; the process identified legal identity gaps among residents as an issue requiring attention (Centre for Migration Studies, 2025).

The available evidence does not establish a large, organized campaign of digital resistance by Pusiga residents against the Ghana Card system. It does show a more grounded civic response: communities participated in consultations and assessments, institutions adapted registration arrangements, and community-based identity verification was incorporated into the process. The lesson is not rejection of digitalisation but insistence that digitalisation remains connected to local knowledge, human assistance and the right to be heard.

7. Ubuntu: From Data Subjects to Persons in Relationship

Ubuntu provides a powerful framework for this experience. In African communitarian thought, a person is not an isolated data-bearing individual but a person-in-relationship. Identity is formed through family, community, memory, and mutual obligations. Pusiga therefore reveals a tension between two ways of knowing a person: a relational system that knows the individual through social belonging and a data system that knows the individual through fields, documents and biometrics.

This does not mean biometric identification is inherently contrary to ubuntu. A reliable identity system can protect people, reduce fraud, facilitate services, and strengthen security. The ubuntu question is whether the system recognises the person behind the record and leaves room for human relationship when the record is incomplete. An ethical digital system should ask not only, “What does the database contain?” but also, “Who is the person standing before us, and how can we fairly establish the truth?”

Ubuntu shifts the debate from data ownership to relational responsibility. It asks institutions to build systems that can listen, verify, correct, and restore. It also calls communities and civil society to develop digital literacy that enables people to understand public data systems and participate in their governance (Mokoena, 2024; Segun, 2024).

8. Human Dignity, Data Colonialism and the Common Good

This article argues that AI can reproduce structural inequalities when systems are designed around data, infrastructures and assumptions that do not adequately reflect African realities. Pusiga makes this argument concrete. Public institutions increasingly govern through data categories that citizens may find difficult to question. This raises the broader concern of data colonialism: who defines the categories, controls the infrastructure, sets the standards and decides what counts as valid knowledge about a person?

Human dignity offers a different starting point. Dignity does not begin with a successful database match. A person's worth precedes verification. Digital governance should therefore ensure that data systems serve people rather than making people serve systems. This requires accessible registration, transparent procedures, proportionate data practices, community participation, and meaningful remedies when errors occur.

9. What the Community Is Asking from Digital Governance

The Pusiga experience points toward a practical agenda: accessible registration services; human assistance for people who struggle with forms, documentation or digital procedures; clear explanations for delays or exclusions; reliable routes to correct inaccurate information; and accessible mechanisms through which decisions can be challenged. Communities also need digital literacy in locally meaningful languages and should not have to prove the same identity repeatedly across institutions.

Participation is equally important. People who live within digital systems should have a voice in how those systems are designed and evaluated. They should be able to ask what data are collected, why they are collected, who can access them, how long they are kept, how mistakes are corrected, and which institution bears responsibility when harm occurs. Independent oversight is essential because those who experience exclusion should not have to challenge the system through the same inaccessible structures that produced the problem.

10. Catholic Social Teaching and Magnifica Humanitas

Catholic Social Teaching gives this local experience a wider moral grammar. Human dignity establishes the worth of the person; solidarity calls us to attend to those who bear the burden of exclusion; subsidiarity requires meaningful community participation; the preferential option for the vulnerable demands’ special attention to those at risk; and the common good asks whether digital transformation benefits society.

Pope Leo XIV'sMagnifica Humanitas is especially relevant. Paragraph 97 states that human intelligence, conscience, and freedom must guide technological innovation and determine its limits. Paragraph 102 warns that when AI enters decisions affecting rights, opportunities and access to public services it can generate new forms of exclusion. Paragraph 103 cautions against giving algorithms the practical power to decide who is worthy without identifiable human responsibility. Paragraph 104 says that exclusion without the possibility of appeal contradicts human dignity. Paragraph 105 calls for clearly defined responsibility and the ability to justify, monitor, challenge and remedy harmful decisions. These principles apply to data-driven public administration even where the immediate technology is not an autonomous AI system (Leo XIV, 2026, paras. 97, 102–105).

Ghana's first National AI Strategy, launched in April 2026, seeks inclusive growth, local capacity, ethical and legal frameworks, and action to bridge the digital divide so that no Ghanaian is left behind. The Pusiga experience gives that ambition a human test: inclusion must mean more than access to technology; it must mean that the least visible citizen can obtain recognition, understand the system, correct an error and participate in decisions about it (Ministry of the Interior, 2026).

11. Conclusion

The question raised by Pusiga is larger than the Ghana Card. It is about the kind of society Ghana is building as digital infrastructures become central to citizenship, public administration and access to services. A database can be accurate without being humane; a biometric system can be secure without being accessible; and a procedurally consistent decision can still feel unjust to the person who cannot make themselves eligible to it.

The answer is not to reject AI, digital identity, or technological progress. It is to insist that the human person remains prior to the system. Northern Ghana's border communities remind us that identity is lived before it is digitised; belonging is relational before it is recorded; and justice requires more than a technical process. The future of digital governance should therefore be judged by what happens to those at the margins: the person with missing documents, the mobile household, the rural resident, the minority community, the person who does not understand the platform, and the citizen who needs to challenge a decision.

The deepest contribution of ubuntu and Catholic Social Teaching is to insist that no person should disappear behind a data field. The question is not whether Ghana should embrace AI and digitalisation, but whether Ghana's digital future will recognise the dignity of every person, including those whose lives do not fit neatly into databases. A humane digital future will be built when technology serves people, communities and the common good.

References

• Centre for Migration Studies. (2025).Ghana launches community engagement and policing strategy to strengthen border governance. University of Ghana.
• International Organization for Migration. (2023).A security perception/vulnerability assessment in selected border communities in northern Ghana.
• Leo XIV. (2026).Magnifica Humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Vatican Publishing House.
• Ministry of the Interior. (2026, April 24).President Mahama launches Ghana's National AI Strategy, calls for AI that reflects Ghanaian values. Government of Ghana.
• Mokoena, K. K. (2024). A holistic ubuntu artificial intelligence ethics approach in South Africa.Verbum et Ecclesia, 45(1), a3100. https://doi.org/10.4102/ve.v45i1.3100
• National Identification Authority. (2024a, May 21).Special Ghana Card registration begins for residents along Ghana-Burkina Faso border [Press release].
• National Identification Authority. (2024b, May 22).NIA responds to Hon. Omane Boamah on pilot Ghana Card registration exercise in Pusiga, Upper East Region [Press release].
• National Identification Authority. (2025a).Frequently asked questions. https://nia.gov.gh/faqs/
• National Identification Authority. (2025b).Registration of Ghanaians in Ghana. https://nia.gov.gh/service/registration-of-citizens-in-ghana/
• National Identification Authority. (2026a, July 9).NIA, in partnership with IOM, commences special registration for the Ghana Card in Sissala West, Lambussie and Kassena-Nankana West districts [Press release].
• National Identification Authority. (2026b, June 9).Government makes biometric verification mandatory for Ghana Card verification under new L.I. 2523.
• Segun, S. (2024). Are certain African ethical values at risk from artificial intelligence?Data & Policy, 6, e68. https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2024.64

Author

Cover image credits: Side profiles of four African women from different generations. Photo: Abubakar Mamman (Photographer | Creative Director). Source: Pexels, published under a free-use licence on 3 March 2026.