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Leon Schreiber, minister in the Department of Home Affairs (DHA).

For many South Africans, a trip to Home Affairs once meant a day lost to queues, paperwork and uncertainty. One of the reasons for this uneasy reality is that the department has historically been under-resourced, serving 63 million people through 349 offices across one of the largest countries on the continent. And with resources stretched that thin, the gap between what citizens needed and what the department could actually deliver was simply unsustainable. “Under the old model, how could you expect an organisation to deliver at 100% when it only had 40% of the resources it needed?” asks Dr Leon Schreiber, minister in the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). “You have to change the model.” Since taking office in July 2024, Schreiber has turned to technology to close the gap that funding could not. The department has issued smart IDs at a scale the country had never seen, begun processing applications through bank branches in under five minutes and drawn interest from foreign governments wanting to understand how it was all done.

Schreiber’s digital strategy is called Home Affairs @Home. Rather than requiring citizens to travel to a government office, services come to them. “Banks used to mean physical branches and physical cash. These days, people use online banking and digital applications,” he says. “The bank securely came to you. If the bank stores your savings, then Home Affairs stores your data. It’s very similar.” A partnership with the banking sector had existed since 2016, but it operated manually, with DHA officials processing applications by hand inside bank branches.