This article will reemphasise the importance of the discussions of legal identity, which now increasingly take the form of discussions of digital identity, for scholars of world development. It will do so with particular reference to the challenges of ‘providing legal identity’ in Africa. Identification systems across Africa are rapidly being upgraded. Governments are increasingly linking access to services such as health and education to possession of a government-issued centralised form of identification. There are major efforts to improve birth registration, and civil registration more generally, sponsored by UN agencies working with the African Union (APAI-CRVS, n.d.). National identity cards have been introduced where they did not previously exist, or converted to biometric versions where they did. There is, as a consequence, now a great deal of practitioner literature surrounding the concept of ‘legal identity’; the World Bank has even established a programme on ‘identification for development’. The ‘international blind spot’ (Szreter, 2007, p. 68) for the significance of the right to an identity has been comprehensively filled. The scholarly literature remains relatively limited – though rapidly growing. Too often overlooked is this literature is one of the central points of Simon Szreter's article: that the system of identity registration that facilitated economic development in England was centred on the needs of individuals rather than those of the state. This article also adds another angle. In the 16th century, the question of whether a person living in England was or was not a subject of the English monarch was rarely if ever in dispute, and not recorded in the parish registers that provided the first identification system. In today’s globalised world, however, distinctions among those with legal status as citizens, legal residents, irregular migrants, refugees, or stateless persons, are ever more important to the ability to enjoy other rights. States strongly resist infringement on their sovereign discretion to decide these categories and to record them in the new or upgraded identification systems. International development agencies supporting identification initiatives, including the World Bank, are hesitant to challenge this discretion, thanks to the limitations of their mandates; but the consequences of not dealing with them at the early stages of introduction of new identification systems may mean rather the sharpening of existing inequalities than the social inclusion being promoted as their nominal objective. There is a delicate balancing act in strengthening state capacity, while ensuring sufficient safeguards. (Legal) identity in international human rights law As Simon Szreter noted, the right to an identity is long-established in the international human rights regime, and this right has received greater attention since he wrote. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and a range of other international human rights treaties establish that every person has the right to recognition as a person before the law, enabling that person to assert rights, to enforce contracts, or to assert or defend a case in court. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — by which every state in the world except the United States has agreed to be bound — includes two articles that deal directly with the issues. Article 7, like Article 24 of the ICCPR, provides for every child to have the right to a name, to be registered immediately after birth and to acquire a nationality. A number of other UN and regional treaties have similar commitments, emphasising especially birth registration and the right to a nationality (the term more often used in international law, where it is a synonym for citizenship). Universal birth registration, ‘the continuous, 2