Civil registration specialist Studia Inc has signed a strategic partnership with Senegal-based D.IA Advisory to expand the deployment of its register digitisation services across Africa, the two companies announced.
The agreement builds on Studia’s work in Madagascar, where the company digitised and indexed close to 10 million civil registration records as part of the national EC-MADA programme. The project mobilised 500 staff over seven months to cover 1,695 communes across 11 priority regions, including remote areas reached by autonomous mobile units running on satellite connectivity and solar power.
Under the partnership, Studia retains responsibility for digitisation and indexing operations. D.IA Advisory will handle local integration: bringing data into existing information systems, ensuring interoperability with national platforms, and supporting compliance with regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
Half of sub-Saharan under-fives unregistered
UNICEF’s December 2024 report The Right Start in Life found that only 51 per cent of children under five are registered in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that accounts for half of the world’s 90 million children without a legal identity. Registration rates fall to 41 per cent in East and Central Africa.
AI-assisted register digitisation
Studia’s pipeline integrates artificial intelligence into the processing chain. Specialised optical character recognition models extract handwritten data and segment registers into individual records, with a blind double-entry mechanism combining algorithmic processing with independent human validation to support reliability standards required by national identity systems.
“Our expertise is built on mastering large-scale digitisation of civil registration records, with exacting standards for data quality and reliability,” said Studia chief executive Jean-Claude Fioravanti. “This partnership strengthens our capacity to deploy our solutions across diverse local environments.”
D.IA Advisory founder Abdoulaye Dia said the firm’s role would focus on “the fluid and lasting integration of solutions into existing systems, taking into account local institutional and regulatory specificities”.
Both companies will present the partnership at the ID4Africa 2026 Summit in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on 12-15 May.
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