The Policy Innovation Lab is supporting South Africa’s digital transformation by developing an AI-assisted legislative catalogue for the country’s envisioned digital ID system. This tool maps the complex network of laws governing the creation and operation of digital ID, helping policymakers identify gaps, conflicts and redundancies across existing legislation. By providing an interactive and analytical overview of the legal landscape, the Lab’s work ensures that South Africa’s digital transformation is grounded in a coherent and compliant legal framework.
In May 2025, the South African government published the National Digital Transformation Roadmap, initiating a nationwide effort to modernise the operations of government. The roadmap’s objective is to digitalise key government functions to enhance and improve economic inclusion and service delivery. This transformation is built upon the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which refers to a set of foundational digital systems and platforms that support the delivery of public and private services to society at scale.
The importance of DPI
For a country like South Africa, the importance of DPI cannot be understated. Today, accessing essential services like opening a bank account or applying for and receiving a social grant requires in-person visits, a plethora of certified documents, and a great deal of frustration and hardship. At a national level, inefficiencies result in the sub-optimal allocation of resources and a greatly constrained ability to deliver the quality of services South Africans expect. A functional DPI ecosystem, as envisioned by the roadmap, offers a pathway to replace the current outdated system with one that is modern and secure, allowing citizens to access services from wherever is convenient while having greater control of their personal data.
Core components of the DPI ecosystem
The roadmap identifies four core initiatives for the creation of South Africa’s DPI ecosystem: digital ID, digital payments, data exchange frameworks and secure digital channels. For any DPI system, the creation of a digital ID system is considered to be the first priority as it enables the proper functioning of the other DPI layers. A digital ID is not merely a digital version of your Smart ID card, rather, its is a secure, electronic version of your identity that can be used for a variety of purposes including accessing services remotely and without the need to transfer physical documents.
However, implementing a system of this scale naturally comes with a variety of challenges. One significant hurdle is legislative compliance. The existing corpus of South African legislation is vast, fragmented and often siloed with relevant provisions scatted across numerous acts, including the Constitution, the highly relevant Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) to the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (ECTA). This means that those working to implement the visions of the roadmap, including those constructing a digital ID, have the challenging task of ensuring that its formation is in line with all existing laws at every stage of development. This fragmentation, creates significant implementation risks and potentially exposes these critical national projects to legal challenges which could halt their progress and delay the expansion of service delivery to all South Africans.
Creating a legislative catalogue
To help solve this, the Policy Innovation Lab has initiated a project under the Digital Services Unit of the Presidency’s office to create a comprehensive, analytical catalogue of the entire legislative and policy framework relevant to digital ID. This project serves as a crucial Proof of Concept (PoC) to demonstrate how such a tool can facilitate coherent and effective policymaking and legislative reform.
The project’s methodology combines human and machine intelligence. Using our AI-assisted tools alongside human expert legal analysis, the Policy Innovation Lab team has systematically identified, extracting and cataloguing every relevant provision from South Africa’s legislative corpus, mapping it to the creation of a digital ID system. The output is an interactive, analytical catalogue that identifies specific legislative conflicts and redundancies. The value add of a tool of this kind is that it allows stakeholders to see the complete legislative picture in once place in an interactive and easy to use format.
By making the opaque legal framework visible and navigable, this catalogue provides an essential due diligence and risk mitigation tool. It empowers Workstream 7 of the national roadmap, which is tasked with legal reform, to make informed, evidence-based decisions. This PoC, focused on digital ID, demonstrates a scalable, AI-assisted approach that could be applied to other complex policy areas, ensuring that South Africa’s digital transformation is built on a coherent, modern, and legally sound foundation.
* This article was written using a combination of human expertise and the Policy Innovation Lab’s in-house AI tools.