Egypt is taking full advantage of its tech savvy population after its government announced that the country could soon roll out one of the largest number of digital identity cards in the world.

This is according to Ars Technica, which has reported that the Egyptian ministry, as well as the Embassy, plans to work with Estonia to release digitised ID documents to the country’s 85 million people.

Sherif Hashem, a senior advisor to the Egyptian ministry of communications and information technology, said in a post that with a mobile penetration rate of over 100%, the time is right to modernise the country’s government services.

“The insistence on keeping the paper-based transactions is unjustifiable,” he reportedly said.

Hashem explained that digitising ID cards would be an advantage because data on the existing ID documents must frequently be re-entered manually into a computer when people deal with government agencies, schools, hospitals, businesses and banks.

He added that by standardising digital ID cards, Egyptians would also be able to interact with the government in a much more efficient manner.

“We proposed this five years ago, but we now have a clear case. When we discussed this before with our government, they said they don't see it in Europe or United States,” Hashem said.

However, Hashem did not shy away from the fact that full deployment of the new digital ID cards could take time to spread across the country, saying he was optimistic and called the move a “very important project.”

“The point is that in Estonia it took 12 years to reach all 1.3 million people. One of the enemies we have is that people expect results immediately,” he said.