Saudi Interior Ministry adds four Absher services for civil registration

Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Interior added four new electronic services to its Absher platform during LEAP 2026, expanding what citizens and residents can complete online rather than in person at a civil affairs office. The services, launched through the ministry's Agency of Civil Affairs and announced by its acting supervisor, Major General Dr. Saleh Al-Murabba, cover four specific transactions: updating the photograph on a national identity card, issuing a birth certificate for a birth that was never registered electronically, requesting delivery of a death certificate for a resident, and requesting a replacement death certificate for a resident when the original has been lost or damaged. Each is a narrow, procedural service rather than a new system, and that is the point. Absher has spent more than a decade absorbing individual government transactions one at a time — the platform now covers everything from vehicle registration to passport renewal — and this batch of four continues that pattern rather than announcing something new. What makes them worth noting individually is what they replace: services that previously required a citizen, or a resident's family, to visit a civil affairs office in person, sometimes at a moment — arranging a death certificate — when that is the last thing anyone wants to be doing. The identity-card photo update service is the most broadly relevant of the four, since most citizens periodically need to refresh the photograph on a still-valid card. The birth and death certificate services are narrower but address a real gap: undocumented older births and lost or damaged death paperwork are exactly the kind of case where a manual, in-person process previously left no fast electronic alternative. This is a Civil Affairs Agency announcement, distinct from the ministry's other Absher-related news at LEAP this week. Its Passports Directorate separately used the same platform to open resident photo updates for iqama holders — a similar-sounding but administratively separate service, run by a different directorate for a different population. The two announcements are easy to conflate because both involve photo updates through Absher, but one is a Civil Affairs service for citizens' national ID cards and the other is a Passports service for residents' iqama records. The four services sit within the Interior Ministry's broader LEAP 2026 presence, built around a dedicated technology pavilion spanning civil affairs, passports, civil defense and border security. Absher itself was also cited this week processing more than 3.3 million interactions and 348,000 transactions through its newer "Absher Companion" assistant, developed jointly with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Digital Government Authority — useful context for how much traffic any addition to the platform is likely to see. No rollout figures specific to these four new services — how many requests have been processed, or over what period — have been published. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.