and interviews with experts and those affected, NIRA faces many problems, including: (i) an emphasis on mass enrolment drives versus underinvestment in an operating model that allows for continuous enrolment; (ii) problems with both the printing and issuance of new cards, (iii) high rates of errors on issued cards and in the National Identification Register (NIR), (iv) high costs associated with replacing cards; (v) allegations of bribery and corruption in the context of issuing ID cards, (vi) a highly centralised operation, and (vii) lack of an adequate budget. A crucial failure relates to NIRA taking over the responsibility for birth and death registration from the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB). Very few people in Uganda have birth certificates, which are required to prove their legal identity and age.42 NIRA has prioritized signing up the adult population for Ndaga Muntu and has not invested as much in the registration of vital events. The outgoing Acting Executive Director of NIRA, Brig. Gen. Stephen Kwiringira, who has long been an influential figure in the project, recently admitted: “Part of the problem is that we started with capturing, registering people for elections purposes, yet ideally, I think we should have started with registering births.”43 As a result, the birth registration44 rate in Uganda has reached shockingly low numbers; recent estimates suggest that only 13% of children under 1 had their births registered, and death registration is also deplorably low.45 This is especially troubling considering that SDG 16 requires legal identity for all and SDG 17 aims for countries to have 100% birth registration and 80% death registration by 2030.46 Among other things, this means that as Uganda’s young population reaches adulthood and becomes eligible to register for Ndaga Muntu, a majority of them will be unable to prove their identity and age because they have no birth certificate. It is as if NIRA’s left hand does not know, or simply does not care, what its right hand is doing. The consequences are ironic and, most of all, tragic. 5. What is digital about Uganda’s digital ID system? Yet another problem is that Ndaga Muntu barely seems to profit from the promised benefits of digitalisation. One of the alleged benefits of the national ID project was that it would take advantage of digital and biometric technology–such as fingerprint readers–to simplify registration and verification procedures and make it possible to quickly achieve universal coverage. But Ndaga Muntu is a system that may be digital at its core but is still mostly analog on the periphery. NIRA maintains air-conditioned server rooms to house its NIR in Kampala, while we witnessed how rural health centre workers still register the national ID numbers of patients by writing them down in paper booklets provided by NIRA. These booklets are usually stored in a locked room in the health centre or hospital and never leave that room. Part of the challenge is that, like many modern national ID projects, Ndaga Muntu attempts to marry a documentary identification system, which relies on physical ID cards inscribed with biographic data, with a biometric identification system, which relies on computer analysis to read physical characteristics like fingerprint patterns and facial features.47 The result is, again, the worst of all worlds. It is both a cumbersome, paperbased documentary system, vulnerable to fraud and corruption and without the benefits attached to digitalisation, and a rigid biometric and digital system, subject to errors, failure of equipment, and marred by lack of internet and electricity. This makes the national ID 14 Chased Away and Left to Die