AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 6 No 2, MAY-AUG 2020 illegally and legally but subsequently broke or dishonored the conditions of their stay. This paper reviews the literature on childhood statelessness and identifies the role that social workers in South Africa can play. Firstly, it presents an overview of the methodology used, followed by a discussion of the nature of statelessness. Next, it introduces the general pathways to statelessness, and discusses the nexus between statelessness and transnational migration. The author then presents an overview of childhood statelessness in general, highlighting statelessness in South Africa. Lastly, the paper identifies implications for social work practice and suggests avenues for future research. METHODOLOGY This paper is based on a desk-study of the available literature on statelessness. The reference period was June to November 2018. The initial search for material used keywords such as ‘statelessness*’, ‘statelessness migrant children*’, ‘statelessness South Africa*’ and ‘statelessness AND social work’. A further search was conducted in March 2020 with a specific focus on South Africa and southern Africa. The researcher also conducted a grey literature search. The databases that were used included Social Work Abstracts, PsychINFO, and Social Services Abstracts (SSA). The selection criteria required the journal articles to be under 15 years old, peer-reviewed, and written in English. In addition, reports commissioned by international organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were included and key websites and online resource libraries including Google Scholar were searched. A manual search in different documents led to the identification of additional articles and reports which were included. Despite efforts to reduce bias in this review, methodological limitations exist. For example, the articles which were included were reviewed by one person, i.e. the author of the article. In addition, the review did not include articles which were written in languages other than in English and available online. DEFINING STATELESSNESS AND SCOPE A stateless person is an individual who does not have a nationality. Such persons cannot enjoy the protection of any country, and although they might identify with a certain country, they cannot call any country their own. According to Ball et al. (2014: 3), stateless people lack a legal bond of nationality with any country. In other circumstances, they may have a valid claim to citizenship, but they cannot prove citizenship, or governments have refused to grant them citizenship. Children who are undocumented because of lack of registration at birth end up subsequently not being recognized as citizens. Indeed, statelessness also affect children born in South Africa. According to Foster and Lambert (2016), careful analysis is crucial of a country’s application of domestic laws to individual cases to determine who is awarded 8