marginalized and has been largely overlooked, underappreciated, and left unaddressed. The costs imposed on individuals by Ndaga Muntu are difficult to quantify, but include at least: (i) the cost of taking time off—sometimes days—to travel to enrol, (ii) the cost of correcting errors, or replacing lost or stolen cards: while the first issuance of the NIN and NIC is free, any additional services come at a high cost, including at least 50,000 UGX (approximately $14 USD) in direct fees, or (iii) the cost of bribes involved in obtaining an NIC. And this leaves out the cost that is most difficult to quantify while being the most important one for those who are marginalized: the cost of foregoing health care or social assistance because one does not have an NIC or errors on their NIC. Some of these people pay the ultimate price. As one woman in Amudat said powerfully, “Without an ID or clinic card for women who have been receiving antenatal care, [you will receive] no treatment. Many people fall sick and stay home and die.” Meanwhile, the direct benefits for the government appear rather slim. The only cost-benefit analysis that has been published is a study by the ResilientAfrica Network at Makerere University and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It compared what it identified as $56.2 million USD in total financial costs for the national ID system, concentrating mainly on investments made in 2014, to $42.6 million USD of estimated annual benefits accrued by the Ugandan government. The study looked only at costs and benefits from the perspective of the government and found that the largest proportion of savings would come from reducing duplication in the electoral registration process and reducing the cost of ghost workers on the government payroll.52 As indicated above, our own calculation estimates much higher costs associated with Ndaga Muntu by looking at a longer time period. Our much higher estimate is backed up by an audit by Uganda’s Auditor General, although for a shorter time period.53 Furthermore, we wonder whether specific savings or benefits identified by Makerere, such as the $288,000 USD supposedly saved on the Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment (SAGE) programme because of Ndaga Muntu, are completely accurate and, more importantly, justify all the human costs identified in this report. Beyond financial and economic benefits, we also wonder how well Ndaga Muntu is serving the government’s national security needs, one of the main rationales for introducing the national ID in the first place. For starters, as noted above, a significant part of the adult population, as much as one third, is still not provided with an NIC. On top of that exclusion, many of the ID cards that have been issued contain errors which compromise the quality of NIRA’s central information database, the NIR. This seems to undermine any supposed security benefits. What is more, the indirect ‘costs’ of Ndaga Muntu for national security may be underestimated. One thing that struck us in our research was the many different ways that the national ID system is influencing the division of power in Uganda. Key decisions about who is a Ugandan now sit with NIRA rather than the constitutionally mandated National Citizenship and Immigration Board (NCIB). Local officials, like the Local Council (LC1) Chairperson, no longer have authority to recognize and identify their own local community members. In response to questions about exclusion, local government officials have told us, “It is government policy,” and, “there is no room for discretion.” As a result, they are increasingly seen as powerless to resolve crucial issues around identification and access to social services by the local populations they serve. Moreover, line ministries such as the Ministry of Health (MOH) and Ministry of 16 Chased Away and Left to Die