AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 statelessness, on the one hand, and forced migration, mass migration, trafficking, and similar phenomena, on the other; and legitimate as well as arbitrary grounds for deprivation of nationality. Moreover, the role of stakeholders such as the judiciary and the question of how to include the voices of affected communities in the development and implementation of laws, policies, and programmes that impact on statelessness remain examples of ongoing areas of research interest. At the same time, many newly emerging issues related to statelessness in Africa should also be interrogated. These are not necessarily unique to Africa, but their interactions with the continent’s social, economic, cultural, historical, legal, developmental, and other aspects of African realities could call for a more focused or context-specific response with a view to preventing and addressing statelessness. A few key areas — namely, the SDGs, COVID-19, counter-terrorism measures, and climate change — and their interactions with stateless persons are highlighted below. First, the implementation of actions directed towards achieving the SDGs has significant implications for preventing and addressing statelessness. This is demonstrated, for example, by Badewa’s article. Target 16.9 — ‘Achieve universal legal identity and birth registration by 2030’37 — is the most obvious candidate for interrogation in respect of statelessness in Africa, including how ‘legal identity’ is understood and what it could entail for stateless persons.38 Meanwhile, other SDGs goals such as Goals 3 (on health) and Goal 4 (on education) are also important. Another worthy focus, is understanding the impact on statelessness of Goal 10, which aims to ‘[r]educe inequality within and among countries’, and its corresponding Target 10.7 on migration, which aims to ‘[f]acilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’. Since the SDGs are complemented by the continent-wide Agenda 2063 of the AU, the impact of the implementation of the latter on statelessness has mostly escaped scrutiny to date. Secondly, the COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on the disproportionate impact of health emergency measures on stateless persons. Sharon Kane aptly conveys this in describing how the initial mantra that ‘we are all in the same boat’ changed to ‘we are all in the same storm, but in different boats’, with stateless persons being in effect ‘boatless’.39 For example, restrictions on the right to freedom of movement had disproportionate impacts on stateless persons in Africa. The mostly inwardlooking measures a number of states took to protect their own citizens reveal how easily refugees and stateless persons can be excluded from humanitarian and other United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2015). Goal 16 aims to ‘promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’. 38 See, for example, Bronwen Manby ‘“Legal identity for all” and statelessness: Opportunity and threat at the junction of public and private international law’ (2021) World Development at 270, for reflections on the advantages as well as risks posed by the conceptualisation and implementation of measures around Target 16.9. 39 Sharon Kane ‘Caught in the storm without a boat: The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on stateless persons’ (24 January 2022) Refugee Law Initiative Blog on Refugee Law and Forced Migration, available at https://rli.blogs.sas. ac.uk/2022/01/24/caught-in-the-storm-without-a-boat-the-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-stateless-persons/ 37 12