A World Bank-funded project to verify the identity of teachers in remote areas of Pakistan has embraced biometrics as its preferred authentication method. The idea is to identify “ghost employees” and to combat absenteeism.
In April 2015, the Pakistan Education Department began a pilot program where representatives travel to different villages to verify the identity of teachers within remote villages. Both primary and secondary school teachers will be identified and tracked; their photos and thumb-impressions are saved in the system locally and fed into the central data system in Karachi; eventually, IT professionals will be hired to monitor the system.
The scope of the project is 150,000 educators within Pakistan, with the ultimate goal of having real-time attendance monitoring in each village. To make it happen, the World Bank has committed $66 million to build out the verification process.
It’s obviously a job for mobile technology, so Integrated Biometrics’ portable fingerprint scanner, Columbo, was selected. The pilot also uses a matching database built by the Education Department.
“Integrated Biometrics’ technology is a great fit for mobile identity verification in any environment due to its reliability, ease of use and operation in direct sunlight,” said Steve Thies, CEO at Integrated Biometrics. “The fact that our products are being used to improve education for hundreds of thousands of children is incredibly humbling and rewarding.”
The project hasn’t gone over well with everyone: Members of the Government Secondary Teachers Association (GSTA) in the Larkana district went on strike in May to protest the program, which targets around 35,000 primary and secondary schools’ teachers posted there.