• • • • Highest priority: Documentation High priority: Health; Education; Access to Justice; Work/Employment; and Detention Medium priority: Gender-Based Violence; Human Trafficking; and Access to Banking/Financial Systems Low priority: Land/Property Rights; Climate Change Ultimately, it is states that are obligated to, and have the means to address such issues at a structural level, in order to meaningfully promote and protect the right to nationality and the rights of stateless people. The work of community activists, NGOs and other stakeholders in these areas can shape, influence and inform state action in this regard. A Closer Look at Needs: Health & Education As the CESF Consortium’s activities were winding down, the issues of health and education – two of the areas identified by CESF Consortium members as a high priority for ongoing and future work – were unpacked further through an additional research and consultation process. The aim was to better understand how statelessness affects enjoyment of these rights, in order to contribute to a stronger evidence-base for related interventions and programming. Rebecca Yang, a graduate student of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health conducted her practicum research among CESF Consortium members, looking at the impact of statelessness on health equity and the social determinants of health. She carried out desk research in late 2021 and then key informant interviews in Kenya and Montenegro (in person), as well as the Dominican Republic and India (online) during the first half of 2022. Her research showed that the discrimination, stigmatisation and economic marginalisation experienced by stateless communities adversely impact their health – including by contributing to poor living conditions and high levels of anxiety. These factors were aggravated by COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that disproportionately impacted the livelihoods of stateless populations and led to increased prejudice against these communities in contexts where minorities were used as scapegoats for the public health crisis. Health access was a problem across all countries, due to discriminatory treatment, documentation requirements, and real or perceived costs (including of seeking private medical care out of fear that approaching public health providers might lead to arrest, detention or deportation). The interviews uncovered examples of how people without nationality or documentation were deprioritised or treated differently – such as in Montenegro where patients without legal status could not be registered in electronic medical record systems, adversely affecting the continuity of care. The array of real and perceived obstacles faced by stateless people were widely understood to disincentivise them from utilising health services, which may in turn have been a contributing factor to vaccine hesitancy among some groups – even once vaccine programmes were opened to include people without citizenship or documentation. During the second half of 2022, ISI’s Children’s Programme team, supported by students from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, conducted a round of consultations on the right to education with 13 CESF Consortium members. Interviews covered four main areas: the official state position on education for children and the obstacles stateless children face; entry requirements for registration and the role of documentation; alternative forms of education for stateless children; and the COVID-19 impact on stateless children’s access to education. All partners pointed to a variety of significant short and long-term implications for children such as, denial of access to higher education; lack of motivation to study; falsification of documentation; high dropout rates; child/early marriage disrupting education; being forced into expensive and inferior private school options; being issued unrecognised diplomas and degrees; discrimination against girls; and low self-esteem and self-worth. Partners also shared good practices to address these challenges, including providing education on citizenship and rights, confidence-building exercises and building trust within the community. At the end of these consultations, the group discussed several activities and opportunities that could be employed to further elevate and bring visibility to the issue at national and international levels through, for example, advocacy policy briefings. INVESTING IN COMMUNITY – FUNDING STATELESSNESS WORK FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL The potential for building on and expanding the impact of and lessons from the CESF Consortium, by investing in and linking up community initiatives, is significant. Around the world, in CESF project countries and beyond, hundreds of grassroots and stateless led groups have emerged from stateless communities through self-organising and community mobilisation. These groups serve their communities through various strategies, while also fighting to place their issues on national agendas and to take them to the international community. Such groups often operate in extreme precarity; in hostile legal, political, social and economic environments; amidst threats to their security, and while struggling to provide for themselves and their families. These groups should be at the centre of statelessness discourse and agenda setting, as they have experienced first-hand, the impact of statelessness. They understand and often represent the needs and demands of their communities. However, grassroots and stateless-led groups have historically had very limited representation at global level, where agenda setting has been dominated by UN Agencies, western NGOs and academics. Many such groups have been exploited, used in tokenistic ways to ‘front’ the fundraising drives of bigger agencies, or to serve as unacknowledged ‘fixers’ for researchers. Financial insecurity is a significant (though not the only) challenge faced by these groups. For example, almost 80% of 66 participants in a recent survey, 35