Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals Poverty levels are so high here, and without a good education there is no way that the people in this village will realize any meaningful form of development. How will they catch up with the rest of the country if they do not get a decent education? I would very much like to go to university or college to study education in order to be able to return and assist the people in this village. However, I do not have any ID that I could show the authorities. The documents that were issued in school – transcripts and records of attendance – cannot suffice. Neither can my birth certificate alone. If Allah wills, one day I will make it to the university or college. (Interview with Shauku, Coast Province, Kenya, 16 September 2009).107 Health-care services, or a lack thereof, also have a role in preventing or creating statelessness, given the role that the health service plays in facilitating access to registration of births and deaths, critical for the recognition of legal identity, including nationality. Even though health practitioners do not carry out legal registration of births and deaths themselves, they provide the notifications of births and deaths that enable registration and certification to take place.108 Lack of access to health-care services, including maternal health care, thus has an impact on the next generation.109 The broader impact on society and State of excluding stateless persons Providing access to quality health care and education helps not only the individuals and communities most affected by exclusion from these services but also society and the State more broadly. While we have little or no quantitative data specifically focused on the impact of exclusion of stateless persons from these and other public services, the conclusions drawn from studies of other marginalized groups are equally valid. As noted in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2018, “Education benefits all of society”. Moreover, “if improvements are faster among the disadvantaged, the additional growth will reduce poverty, reduce inequality, and promote social mobility.”110 Greater access to education is associated with substantial reductions in income inequality, and in the share of income going to households in the poorest decile.111 Similarly, substandard quality of health care “exerts a substantial economic impact, with considerable cost implications for health systems and communities across the world”; while “Poor-quality care disproportionately affects the more vulnerable groups in society, and the broader economic and social costs of patient harm caused by long-term disability, impairment and lost productivity amount to trillions of dollars each year.”112 The broader impacts on the stateless and on society of excluding stateless people from health care were seen during the global COVID-19 pandemic (see box (H)). 107. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and UNHCR, “Out of the shadows”, 28–29. 108. Sköld, “Understanding Statelessness and Health Through Social Science”; Van Hout, Bigland, and Murray, “Scoping the impact of COVID-19”; Patricia Erasmus, “Statelessness, the right to health, policy, and case law: the potential role of feminist development education and the campaign for universal birth registration”, in Systems Thinking for Global Health, ed. Frédérique Vallières et al. (Oxford University Press, 2022), 293–305, https:// doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799498.003.0023. 109. Amanda R. Cheong and Mary Anne K. Baltazar, “Too precarious to walk: an integrated ‘three delays’ framework for modeling barriers to maternal health care and birth registration among stateless persons and irregular migrants in Malaysia”, Genus 77, No. 1 (2021): 18, https://doi.org/10.1186/ s41118-021-00129-3. 110. “World Development Report 2018 (WDR 2018) – learning to realize education’s promise”, World Bank Group, 2018, p. 41 www.worldbank.org/en/ publication/wdr2018. 111. Ibid., p.42. 112. Delivering quality health services: a global imperative for universal health coverage” World Bank Group, 2018, p.17 https://www.worldbank.org/en/ topic/universalhealthcoverage/publication/delivering-quality-health-services-a-global-imperative-for-universal-health-coverage. 35