AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 Figure 1: SADC States party to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness:19 In Southern Africa, the stateless population overlaps with an even larger undocumented population. The World Bank estimates that over 137 million people in the region are undocumented.20 Many people face severe restrictions in accessing documentation regardless of whether their nationality is contested. Historically, it was far less necessary to prove where one lived or belonged. People who were habitually resident in a country were typically considered citizens.21 Today, identification and documentation are essential to all forms of social and civic participation, including proving nationality. Even residents of the most remote and isolated communities now must establish their identity and nationality. Efforts to document people — such as the World Bank’s ID4D campaign that seeks to ensure every person on the planet has identification by 2030 — are helping. A growing number of people can access identification, particularly digital Manby op cit note 2. World Bank ‘Identification for Development (ID4D) Global Dataset’, available at https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/ dataset/identification-development-global-dataset 21 The Hague & the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) ‘The Hague Colloquium on the Future of Legal Identity’ (2015). 19 20 80