The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is the UN’s global development network, an organization advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build better lives. The UNDP is on the ground in 166 countries, working with them on their own solutions to global and national development challenges. As they develop local capacity, they draw on the people of UNDP and its wide range of partners.

Under the auspices of the United Nations, a program to create secure identification cards for ex-combatants who turned in their weapons was recently field tested in Central Africa. The identification system is made up of a powerful personal computer, an iris camera, a digital camera and a Zebra P310 card printer.

The Badgemaker 5500 card management software is development by Screencheck, while the overall biometric registration and ID card application is developed and locally deployed by BioID Technologies SA of Switzerland. The Badgemaker 5500 security solution combines iris recognition with a demographics database and printout of identification badges on the P310 printer.

Called the Rapid Deployment Registration and the Identification System, the system produces badges at any location, accommodating up to 500 registrations per location per day in Central Africa. Data captured at any given site is transferred by satellite to a centralized database, thus allowing daily updates and access to all information from any workstation in the field. With rapid data acquisition and retrieval, the Badgemaker 5500 with iris scan recognition thus became foolproof identification and verification mechanism.

During the project, when local ex-combatants hand in their weapons, they are rewarded with an official identification badge and benefits card. Data is stored in central database, containing individual records that can be updated at any time for identification and registration purposes.