III. Removing gender-based legal barriers against women to identification There has been growing recognition of the need to reform gender-discriminatory laws and regulations that produce barriers to acquiring legal IDs including birth certificates, national ID cards, and passports. Similarly, efforts have been made in recent years to remove discrimination against women from nationality laws. In some cases, discriminatory aspects of laws regulating access to identity and of nationality laws are due to legacy legislation in former colonies. However, while former colonial powers have largely removed constraints on women’s legal capacity to interact with public authorities and reformed nationality laws, many of the former colonies’ old codes have not been reviewed since independence (UNHCR 2017; World Bank 2018a). Where successful reform has been achieved, it was championed at the highest levels of government, social norms were changing towards greater gender equality and civil society actors, including women’s groups, were instrumental in bringing about favorable changes in the law. In some cases, international human rights mechanisms, such as General Recommendations and Concluding Observations by the CEDAW Committee, led to reviews and triggered legal reforms. The following section highlights examples of recent good practices. To start with, a comprehensive strategy to achieve the ‘legal identity for all’ goal should encompass reforms of marriage registration frameworks, especially when the lack of marriage documentation becomes a barrier to birth registration and certification (Hanmer and Elefante 2016).105 While there has been increasing attention to birth registration and the need to increase birth registration rates, there has been less attention on the importance of strengthening marriage registries. Nevertheless, marriage registration underpins the ability to claim many rights under the law, and some recent reforms and strategies have encompassed marriage registration. We briefly document this below in section b in the context of the Indonesian reforms to streamline the process for obtaining birth certificates and in section c as one of the initiatives adopted by the Jordanian government to facilitate birth registration of Syrian refugees. a) Removing barriers to obtaining national ID cards and passports In recent years, the introduction of digital ID systems has been accompanied by reforms that remove legal differences between men’s and women’s access to national ID cards. For example, Senegal enacted a new national identity card law in 2016 that introduced smart cards which combined voter and civil IDs using biometric information.106 The new law also reformed previous regulations imposing additional requirements on married women when applying for ID cards. A married woman is now no longer required to have her husband’s name on her ID card. Consequently, a wife no longer must provide supporting documentation to establish her husband’s name, and procedures are the same for both men and women (World Bank 2018a). In Iraq, the National Card Act of 2016 has removed all gender differences in the application process for the new Iraqi National Card, an electronic biometric card, which has replaced the Civil Identification Document (which required male consent).107 Iraq also enacted a new passport law in 2015 that includes electronic passports and mandates the same application process for men and women, removing the requirement for women to bring a male guardian.108 The use of innovative and secure means of identification, such as biometric IDs, yields specific benefits for women, by simplifying distribution barriers for national IDs and facilitating the delivery of public 17