3M wins Nigerian Seafarers Identity Document contract

St. Paul, Minnesota-based 3M is known first and foremost as a scotch tape manufacturer, but homeland security professionals are starting to realize the company is just as good at piecing together unique identity management systems. We reported last month on the company’s success in winning a visa issuance contract for the CARCICOM countries of Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago — a rushed job required ahead of the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup. Now we hear that 3M will be putting together the Nigerian Seafarers’ Identity Document (SID).

The SID is a joint project between the United Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO) to mitigate the hardships of sailors who often spend years at sea. Far too often, a merchant sailor will arrive at a foreign port without a visa, forcing him to stay onboard. This is unjust, considering how long these men have been travelling, and so the SID provides a means to assure host nations that sailors coming abroad have been vetted by their host countries. In order to keep things simple, the ILO created a standardized fingerprint biometrics issuance system that includes the most basic of reading technologies: a bar code printed on the back of the SID card. Nigerian sailors, who come from a long seafaring tradition, will have to go to the local office of the Joint Maritime Labour Industrial Council in order to be registered.

According to 3M’s Todd Kealey, the company is in talks with a number of other nations to develop similar projects, none of which he would name. As he explained, many of the nations with large seafaring industries — the Phillipines, Indonesia, and Panama among them — rely on support from donor nations through the U.N. to buy the systems. These arrangements are currently being worked out, and 3M does not want to compromise them.

-read more in this company news release