‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness economic development generally. 83 Development think tanks agree with this assessment. 84 Important as birth registration is recognised to be, however, achieving complete coverage of a population by improving registration at the time of birth would necessarily involve a wait of 70 years or more. Although an effort to improve late registration of births and other events is a potential solution (successfully implemented in South Africa, for example), 85 the emphasis has shifted to the broader, undefined, target. 86 Technical professionals also tend towards a certain impatience with the complexities of legal status in private or public international law. The rapid advance of digital technology leads many to the conclusion that the best way to achieve the SDG legal identity target is ‘through digital identity systems, central registries storing personal data in digital form and credentials that rely on digital, rather than physical, mechanisms to authenticate the identity of their holder’. 87 Low-income countries can, it is argued, ‘leapfrog’ the paper-based stage, and move straight to digital identification. 88 Data protection is recognised as a concern, but one that can be managed. 89 In practice, digital identification programmes, most often based on biometrics, are being rolled out at a ‘dizzying pace across the developing world’ — with or without the support of traditional development agencies. 90 Among the actors that have jumped on the ‘legal identity’ target are biometric tech companies, sometimes interested more in rent-seeking 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 Vyjayanti T Desai, Anna Diofasi Metz and Jing Lu, ‘The Global Identification Challenge: Who Are the 1 Billion People without Proof of Identity?’, World Bank Blogs (Blog Post, 25 April 2018) <https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/global-identification-challenge-who-are-1billion-people-without-proof-identity>. Elizabeth Stuart et al, ‘The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions’ (Research Report No 3, Overseas Development Institute April 2015) <https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/9604.pdf>; Gelb and Diofasi Metz (n 9). Jaap van der Straaten and Anna Zita Metz, South Africa ID Case Study (Working Paper No 137142, World Bank, 1 May 2019) <http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/315081558706143827/South-Africa-ID-CaseStudy>. The World Bank has produced a dataset on the numbers of people without ‘proof of legal identity’ that provides a global estimate of one billion people without identity documents; but the methodology depends on existing data, which is very incomplete, and does not include coverage of birth registration or certificates for those over five years old: ‘Identification for Development (ID4D) Global Dataset’, The World Bank (Web Page, 2018) <https://id4d.worldbank.org/global-dataset>. Joseph J Atick et al, ‘Spotlight 4: Enabling Digital Development: Digital Identity’ in World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends (Report, World Bank 2016) 194–97. Alan Gelb and Julia Clark, Identification for Development: The Biometrics Revolution (Working Paper No 315, Center for Global Development, 2013) 3, 46; World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends (Report, World Bank 2016) 154. ID Enabling Environment Assessment: Guidance Note (Working Paper No 137288, World Bank, 1 January 2018) <https://id4d.worldbank.org/legal-assessment>; ‘Good ID Explained’, Good ID (Web Page) <https://www.good-id.org/en/about/>. Gelb and Diofasi Metz (n 9) ix. 263