Leaving No One Behind: Statelessness and the Sustainable Development Goals These procedures may be completely unknown or inaccessible to poor people, especially for irregular migrants and refugees. Identification of adults The indicator adopted to show progress towards Target 16.9 considers only the percentage of children under five whose birth has been registered (a figure already collected by the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and the Demographic and Household Surveys (DHS) supported by USAID). However, even if this indicator reaches one hundred percent, universal registration of children being born today does not address the backlog of older children and adults whose own births were not registered in the past. For this reason, many initiatives to address SDG Target 16.9 have focused on directly expanding adults’ access to identification documents. In countries with low existing rates of civil registration and proof of legal status, a proposed model for such new identification systems involves universal biometric registration of identity as a preliminary step, “leapfrogging” the stage of paper-based records, with questions of legal status being resolved later.172 This model was pioneered by the Aadhaar system established by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).173 The objective of such an approach is to establish the ability to prove a unique identity, without the need for further details, on the basis of which access to services can be provided and development benefits secured for all, regardless of legal status in a country. This approach, however, misses opportunities to address statelessness and may exacerbate existing patterns of exclusion. The adoption of new identification systems is a notorious risk point for the creation of stateless populations. There is extensive literature highlighting how projects to strengthen identification, registration and documentation systems may not only have positive impacts, but “also risk increasing or entrenching exclusion for certain populations, especially those already most vulnerable and marginalized.”174 In general, technology – such as biometric registration – is likely to exaggerate rather than mitigate existing problems of differential access to public goods, without specific efforts to counteract these tendencies.175 The introduction of a new identification system is often paired with a requirement to produce the new identity credential to access services – which risks excluding those who previously did not need a specific document to access health care, schooling for their children, or private sector services such as banking. In Uganda, for example, which has historically had low rates of birth registration and until recently did not have a national identity card, the introduction of a new national digital ID system known as Ndaga Muntu is reported to have prevented as much as one third of Uganda’s adult population from accessing services, creating new exclusion rather than inclusion.176 The evidence so far is that the Aadhaar identification system itself has not ended the exclusion of those whose claim to nationality is questioned.177 172. Joseph J. Atick et al., “Spotlight on digital identity”, in World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2016). 173. Shweta Banerjee, “Aadhaar: digital inclusion and public services in India”, Background Paper (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2015), https://thedocs. worldbank.org/en/doc/655801461250682317-0050022016/original/WDR16BPAadhaarPaperBanerjee.pdf; Vivek Raghavan, Sanjay Jain, and Pramod Varma, “India stack – digital infrastructure as public good”, Communications of the ACM 62, No. 11 (October 2019): 76–81, https://doi. org/10.1145/3355625. 174. Megan Brewer, Nicholas Menzies, and Jared Schott, “Making identification systems work for the bottom 40 percent”, Just Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, March 2015), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/774661467986277535/Making-identification-systems-work-for-thebottom-40-percent. 175. Kentaro Toyama, “Technology as amplifier in international development”, in Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (iConference ’11, Seattle Washington USA: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2011), 75–82, https://doi.org/10.1145/1940761.1940772. 176. Unwanted Witness, “Uganda’s digital identification systems and processes in a protracted crisis: what can be done?”, Policy Brief (Kampala, Uganda, December 2020), www.unwantedwitness.org/download/uploads/Ugandas-Digital-Identification-Systems-and-Processes-in-a-protracted-crisis.pdf; Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, and Unwanted Witness, “Chased away and left to die: how a national security approach to Uganda’s national digital id has led to wholesale exclusion of women and older persons” (New York and Kampala, June 2021), https://chrgj.org/focus-areas/technology/everyone-counts-initiative/. 177. Buddhadeb Halder, “Doubtful citizenship: data and division in India’s new citizenship laws”, PS: Political Science & Politics 54, No. 4 (2021): 638–39, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096521000780; Amiya Bhatia and Jacqueline Bhabha, “India’s Aadhaar scheme and the promise of inclusive social protection”, Oxford Development Studies 45, No. 1 (2017): 64–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1263726; Silvia Masiero and S. Shakthi, “Grappling with Aadhaar: biometrics, social identity and the Indian State”, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, No. 23 (2020): 1–11, https:// doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6279; “Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Functioning of Unique Identification Authority of India”, Report No. 24 of 2021 (New Delhi: Union Government of India (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), April 2022), https://cag.gov.in/ webroot/uploads/download_audit_report/2021/24%20of%202021_UIDAI-0624d8136a02d72.65885742.pdf. 45