Bridging the Scholarship Gap on Statelessness in Africa development. The number of stateless persons globally is not known with any exactitude; however, it is reasonable to estimate that it extends into the millions.4 These estimates can vary widely — for example, at mid-2022 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported a total of 4.3 million stateless people worldwide,5 while the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) put the number at around 15 million stateless persons globally.6 Be that as it may be, it is no exaggeration to assert that the presence of millions of stateless persons in a world with close to 200 states is an indictment of the international community’s failure to address the issue head-on. This assertion gains even more weight when one is confronted with the estimation that ‘more than 75 per cent of the world’s known stateless populations are members of minority groups’.7 Indeed, while the reasons that lead to statelessness are manifold, discrimination based on, for example, race, religion, minority status, and gender, is commonly cited as the major cause.8 The issue of statelessness is of significant importance for the African continent. It has its own historical anchors — including colonialism and the subsequent creation of superficial borders. As a result, trans-border migration in the continent has a significant synergy with statelessness. Statelessness also has direct links with some conflicts in the continent. While gaps in and between the nationality laws and practices of states have contributed to the creation of stateless populations on the continent, there is no denying that systematic marginalisation of minorities in which children and women are disproportionately affected, takes the lion’s share of the blame. While Côte d’Ivoire reportedly has the largest stateless population in Africa (around 955,000 in 2019),9 at the end of 2015, more than a million persons were estimated to be under the UNHCR’s statelessness mandate in Africa.10 3 II. GLOBAL AND REGIONAL RESPONSES Fortunately, in the last decades, statelessness has come out of the shadows,11 both in respect of law and practice. There are multiple initiatives at the global as well as regional levels to address the issue. For example, since the launch of the #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024 in 2014, the extent of ratification of the two United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons 1954, Article 1. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘Refugee data finder, available at https://www.unhcr.org/ refugee-statistics/insights/explainers/forcibly-displaced-pocs.html 5 Ibid. 6 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) ‘Statelessness in numbers: 2020 An overview and analysis of global statistics’ (2020), available at https://files.institutesi.org/ISI_statistics_analysis_2020.pdf 7 Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) ‘Minorities, discrimination and statelessness, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/minorities/minorities-discrimination-and-statelessness 8 UNHCR ‘I am here, I belong: The urgent need to end childhood statelessness’ (2015). 9 UNHCR ‘Global trends: Forced displacement in 2019’, available at https://www.unhcr.org/5ee200e37.pdf 10 UNHCR ‘Global trends: Forced displacement in 2015’, available at https://www.unhcr.org/576408cd7.pdf 11 For a detailed and historical account of some of the reasons why statelessness did not get enough attention in the four decades between 1950–1990, see UNHCR ‘The state of the world’s refugees: A humanitarian agenda’ (1997/98), available at http://www.unhcr.org/3eb7ba7d4.pdf 3 4 5