Figure 2. An individual interview in Busia. other words, this is a good place to test for ‘impact’. The purpose we set out for ourselves was to look at how some of the most marginalized people in Uganda experienced exclusion tied to Ndaga Muntu. For this report we chose to focus on how this national ID system affected access to the human right to health for women and to the human right to social security for older persons, especially those living in poverty. Human rights organizations have often focused on concerns surrounding the impact of digital ID systems on the human right to privacy and data protection. While we think that privacy and data protection concerns are also very important and significant in this context,60 we believe that the cumulative impact of this rather narrow focus has led to an overemphasis on a particular set of concerns, often mostly approached from the perspective of changes to regulatory frameworks. Inadvertently, this approach has implied a false dichotomy between the supposed inclusionary benefits of digital ID systems versus attendant negative impacts on the human right to privacy and data protection. What is more, a focus on privacy and data protection concerns has sometimes, inadvertently, led to the assumption that such concerns are ‘fixable’ relatively easily (via regulation).61 We focused on the social rights of the poorest and most marginalized, who repeatedly indicated to us that access to their social rights was their primary concern. This should not be read as implying that they did not care or should not care about their privacy rights, but we highlight a very different and often neglected set of human rights concerns that complements existing research and advocacy. What is more, by focusing on exclusion from digital ID systems, we address a human rights concern that goes to the whole raison d’être of digital ID systems according to its global promoters: the ability of these systems to include and ‘leave no one behind’. Fieldwork in Uganda was conducted by research teams from ISER and UW with assistance from the Digital Welfare State and Human Rights Project at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law (DWS Project). We conducted individual interviews and focus group discussions across six districts of Uganda as well as in the capital of Kampala.62 Researchers explained the purpose of the interviews to each interviewee and obtained their consent to use their information and images. When we deemed a risk to certain individuals, we restricted use of identifying details and employed pseudonyms to protect their identities. We spoke with at least 459 people, including 263 affected individuals, 162 hospital or health centre staff, and 34 local government officials. During our research we not only conducted extensive fieldwork as indicated above, 22 Chased Away and Left to Die