2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) for child protection. 77 Plan International conducted a major global campaign on birth registration from 2005 to 2009, launched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 78 The Lancet published a ground-breaking series of articles in 2007 that drew attention to the ‘scandal of invisibility’ caused by lack of civil registration, and described the neglect of global CRVS systems as ‘the single most critical failure of development over the past 30 years’. 79 The Inter-American Development Bank also took up civil registration as an important issue both for economic development and for individual access to essential services such as health and education. 80 An initiative to improve lamentable rates of civil registration in Africa was launched by a consortium of international agencies with the African Union in 2010. 81 In late 2014, governments in the Asia-Pacific region proclaimed a ‘CRVS Decade’ (2015–24). 82 This growing consensus contributed to the recognition of ‘legal identity’ and birth registration within the SDGs. LEGAL IDENTITY, DIGITAL IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT Development actors have now taken up the ‘legal identity’ SDG target with enthusiasm. In 2014, the World Bank created a unit to coordinate its work on ‘identification for development’, recognising that lack of identity documents can create significant social and economic exclusion, and thus form a drag on 77 78 79 80 81 82 Unity Dow, ‘Birth Registration: The “First” Right’ in Catharine Way (ed), The Progress of Nations: The Nations of the World Ranked According to Their Achievements in Fulfilment of Child Rights and Progress for Women (UNICEF 1998) <https://www.unicef.org/about/history/files/pub_pon98_en.pdf>; United Nations Children’s Fund, ‘Birth Registration Right from the Start’, Innocenti Digest (March 2002) <https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/digest9e.pdf>. Claire Cody, Count Every Child: The Right to Birth Registration (Campaign Report, Plan International, 2009); Simon Heap and Claire Cody, ‘The Universal Birth Registration Campaign’ (2009) 32(April) Forced Migration Review 20. Richard Horton, ‘Counting for Health’ (2007) 370(9598) The Lancet 1526. The full series can be viewed online: see ‘Who Counts?’, The Lancet (Web Page, 30 October 2007) <https://www.thelancet.com/series/who-counts>. The series was updated in 2015: see ‘Counting Births and Deaths’, The Lancet (Web Page, 11 May 2015) <http://www.thelancet.com/series/counting-births-and-deaths>. See, eg, Mia Harbitz, ‘The Civil Registry: A Neglected Dimension of International Development’ (Technical Note No IDB-TN-542, Inter-American Development Bank May 2013) <https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/The-Civil-Registry-ANeglected-Dimension-of-International-Development.pdf>; Mia Harbitz and Bettina BoekleGiuffrida, Democratic Governance, Citizenship, and Legal Identity: Linking Theoretical Discussion and Operational Reality (Working Paper, Inter-American Development Bank, May 2009) <https://publications.iadb.org/bitstream/handle/11319/4300/Democratic%20Governance%2 c%20Citizenship%2c%20and%20Legal%20Identity.pdf>. Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (Web Page) <http://www.apai-crvs.org/>. See Asian and Pacific Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Decade 2015–2024 (Report, Get Everyone in the Picture 2015) <https://getinthepicture.org/sites/default/files/resources/Asian_and_Pacific_Civil_Registrati on_and_Vital_Statistics_Decade2015-2024_Booklet.pdf> 262