IV. The forward agenda Access to all forms of identification is an important stepping stone to women’s agency and freedom of movement. However, as this paper has shown, gender-based legal barriers against women significantly hinder access to identification in many countries. Mobilizing governments, international organizations, and civil society actors to raise awareness about the impact of gender-discriminatory laws can accelerate progress toward addressing barriers that are holding back the achievement of the ‘legal identity for all’ SDG target, as an enabler to other SDGs, including SDG 5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” (Gelb and Dahan 2015). International norms have proved important catalysts for change. UN agencies play an important role, particularly those that work to assist countries in implementing their treaty obligations to protect and promote women’s human rights, as demonstrated by the role of the CEDAW Committee in catalyzing reforms to nationality laws in Morocco (2004) and Algeria (2005). Similarly, UNHCR launched the Campaign to End Statelessness in November 2014—the #IBelong Campaign—an important call to action which aims to end statelessness by 2024. The campaign encourages states to take actions to remove gender discrimination in nationality laws. The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law database has also contributed to the momentum for reform by raising awareness about the lasting effects that discrimination against women in the law can have on women’s economic inclusion and labor force participation and the costs to the economy overall. Where ID registration is low, there is potential for investments in new systems to lift barriers, including through reforming gender-discriminatory legislation and employing design features enhancing women’s access to ID. The World Bank’s ID4D initiative brings global knowledge and expertise to assist countries realize the development prospects of digital identification systems and accelerate progress toward the SDGs. Strengthening civil registration systems is an essential complement to these efforts. Civil registration systems, including birth and marriage registration systems, have the potential to enable the world’s poorest to gain access to critical services, from education to health care and banking. To lift barriers faced by women, it is particularly important that the marriage registration system is strengthened. Moving forward, explicit consideration of gender-based barriers to ID and identification of solutions to lift them will be increasingly necessary to achieve policy goals for poverty reduction set by national governments, development partners (including the private sector), and multilateral institutions. Failure to understand and reform the laws and regulations that produce gender-based legal barriers against women will limit the potential for interventions across a range of sectors—from ICT-based interventions to those which aim to increase economic opportunities, access to government services, financial inclusion, and effectiveness of cash transfers—to deliver results that benefit women and men equally. Finally, while we have documented existing legal barriers to identification as well as some good practices in eradicating these hurdles, continuous research is required to keep available data current. Collection, analysis, and distribution of sex-disaggregated data on birth registration, different types of IDs, and stateless persons are necessary to effectively design, implement, and monitor development policies and programs. 24 ACHIEVING UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ID: GENDER-BASED LEGAL BARRIERS AGAINST WOMEN AND GOOD PRACTICE REFORMS