5. The struggles and failures of NIRA While NIRA is not responsible for the entire design of the Ndaga Muntu system, many of the problems with its implementation originate with this authority. The enormous challenges involved in rolling out a national ID system have simply proven beyond NIRA’s capacity and budget. NIRA has also been torn between where best to allocate its resources. First of all, the attention paid to the national ID project has meant that NIRA has not been able or willing to spend similar attention on CRVS. NIRA took over the responsibility for birth and death registration from the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB), but there is a consensus that it has neglected those responsibilities and focused on the national ID Figure 26. An unattended National ID collection point in Namayingo, where residents had been waiting for three hours to pick up their card. project instead. Very few people in Uganda have birth certificates or documents showing their exact date of birth; the Census in 2014 suggested that fewer than 28% of the adult population currently possess a birth certificate, and UBOS reported in 2016 that only 16.6% of children under 2 and 20.8% of children from 2-4 had a birth certificate.193 Additionally, both birth notification and birth registration have noticeably declined over the past five years,194 with more recent figures suggesting that only 12–13% of children under 1 had their birth registered.195 This means, for example, that as Uganda’s young population turns to adulthood and becomes eligible to register for Ndaga Muntu, a majority of them will be unable to prove their identity and age because they were never registered in the first place. The outgoing Executive Director of NIRA, Brig. Gen Stephen Kwiringira, recently admitted, “Part of the problem is that we started with capturing [and] registering people for election purposes, yet ideally, I think we should have started with registering births.”196 Meanwhile, death registration also remains deplorably low.197 Second, there seems to be a consensus among experts that NIRA has struggled to transition away from this campaign-based model, which is very expensive, to a continuous service operating model.198 Today, those who missed out on a mass registration drive either have to travel to registration points at NIRA’s newly established district offices (currently in 117 out of 146 districts in Uganda), or to NIRA headquarters in the capital of Kampala. Otherwise, they must wait until NIRA conducts one of its irregular mop-up exercises—onetime registration or issuance exercise where NIRA staff travel to local communities to try and enrol those who have not yet signed up or to issue cards that have been printed. Third, NIRA appears to have been ‘distracted’ by other public and private service demands to properly facilitate the integration of Ndaga Muntu. This includes the SIM registration exercise, the Pension Payroll Verification, and the Learner’s Project. The Auditor General’s report on NIRA found that: 70 Chased Away and Left to Die