death thinking you’re a rebel.” Another interviewee told us, “without an ID, they think you are coming from Kenya.” One nurse told us, “here, we have very many Congolese and so they want to reserve medicine for Ugandans.” Yet another nurse said, “It helps in fighting crime because whenever you ask for a national ID card from a criminal, they are turned away [leave] for fear of easy identification.” Our research focused primarily on the human rights impact of requiring Ndaga Muntu for access to health care and social benefit programs, and more specifically how this requirement, with its basis in the 2015 Registration of Persons Act (ROPA), affected women and older persons living in extreme poverty. Nevertheless, we think it is important to start this report by establishing the simple fact that Uganda’s national ID system was designed primarily for national security reasons and carried out under the watchful eyes of Uganda’s powerful military leaders. Even though this is undisputed, many publications on Ndaga Muntu tend to ignore or gloss over the national security dimension altogether.9 This might lead outside observers to wrongly conclude that this national ID system is, at heart, a development program. 2. Ndaga Muntu leads to severe and wholesale exclusion Because Ndaga Muntu was primarily designed to be a national security system and not a social development program, it is perhaps not surprising that one major effect of the national ID system has been to exclude those who are considered non-Ugandans, security risks, or criminals.10 We have undertaken in-depth qualitative research in Uganda to better understand the impact of Ndaga Muntu by interviewing affected individuals as well as other experts and officials. This research confirms that Uganda’s national ID has become an important source of exclusion for the poorest and most marginalized. Yet the scope and seriousness of this exclusion clearly goes far beyond what is necessary to reach stated national security objectives. Based on the government’s own data and other official sources, the reliability of which we cannot guarantee, we have calculated that anywhere between 23% and 33% of Uganda’s adult population has not yet received a National Identity Card (NIC). We have attempted to obtain up-to-date data from the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA), but we unfortunately did not receive a reply from NIRA before publication of this report. An audit of NIRA’s accounts by the Office of the Auditor General in 2019 likely contains the most independent figures and stated that only 12.7 million cards had been ‘issued’,11 as of 2019.12 Based on an adult population of about 18.9 million people in 2019, using national population projections by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS),13 this means that only 67% of the adult population had an NIC in 2019 and 33% were therefore excluded. The Minister of Internal Affairs released figures that claimed that NIRA had printed only 18.32 million cards as of March 2020, and of those, only 15.23 million had actually been issued.14 Assuming an adult population that UBOS projected to reach 19.7 million in 2020,15 this results in an exclusion rate of at least 23%.16 Not only are these exclusion percentages dramatically high for a national ID that is now mandatory to access many public and private services, the percentage of the population that is excluded may even be rising. NIRA previously indicated that, as of October 2018, 14.6 million cards had been issued, on an adult population that UBOS projected as How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 9