The World Food Programme has described its Enterprise Deduplication Service, which analyses registration data to flag possible duplicate beneficiary records. A recent account focuses on use in Mali and broader organisational deployment.

The system flags rather than decides

The service compares information including names and photos and may incorporate further biometric signals in future. WFP says staff review flagged cases and retain the final decision.

Governance accompanies the tool

WFP reports external audits and data-protection assessments. The public article does not publish full false-positive and false-negative rates, so readers cannot independently judge accuracy across populations.

Safeguards for exclusion risk

Humanitarian programmes should log why a record was flagged, provide a rapid correction or appeal path, avoid assuming identity from similarity alone and measure whether some groups are affected more often.