Bridging the Scholarship Gap on Statelessness in Africa
identity (including on birth registration, national identity cards, and digitisation)
on the African continent are supported by bilateral and multilateral organisations
as well as other non-state actors. There is more room for such organisations to use
their resources and leverage to support work aimed at identifying (including data
collection), documenting, and generally understanding and improving the lived
reality of stateless persons in Africa.49
VI. CLOSING REMARKS
There is no doubt that African scholarship on the topic at hand – statelessness in the
African context – is still in short supply. The discussions in this Special Issue attempt
to make a modest contribution to these developing debates from the perspective of
a few African scholars. We encourage all stakeholders to actively engage with the
challenges, gaps, responses, and solutions proposed in the articles of this Special Issue
and consider their role in responding to statelessness in Africa. After all, ‘leaving no
one behind’ deserves no less.
See, for example, Sneha Raghavan & Alan Gelb ‘10 million stateless and growing: How donors can help’ (17 November
2014), available at https://www.cgdev.org/blog/10-million-stateless-and-growing-how-donors-can-help
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