AHMR African Human Mobility Review - Volume 11 No 2, MAY-AUGUST 2025
the pledging system is a means to make incremental progress through smaller,
achievable deliverables, but the low implementation rate reveals early concerns of
unsustainability. The GCR’s dashboard shows that pledge-making spikes in the years
of the Forums, yet the rate of implementation has remained below 30%.
CONCLUSION
The degree to which the GCR and the pledging system can make progress in
eradicating statelessness is largely a function of how receptive a state is to addressing
the issue. States with a pre-existing commitment to enact more inclusive nationality
legislation, expand their civil registration systems, and take other steps toward
eradicating statelessness may reap great benefits from the pledging system and
the momentum of the GCR. However, the pledging system will play a minor role
in states that do not have the same commitment or political will. Further, the
pledging system has no monitoring or accountability authority. Moreover, there is no
obligation to report on the implementation of pledges, let alone to make pledges. It is
evident that the pledging system may be largely facilitatory and unable to galvanize
large-scale burden-sharing. The voluntarist nature of pledging also means that the
implementation rate of pledges has remained low; yet it is important to note that a
developmental approach requires long-term analysis.
There remains an urgent need to eradicate statelessness. States in the SADC
region are encouraged to adopt stateless-determination legislation and undertake
national surveys on statelessness and associated risks to better outline the scope of
the problem. These steps require political will but also financial and other resources.
Addressing statelessness also requires active participation and collaboration from
multiple components of government at every level, as well as non-state actors that
can contribute the necessary resources. Early evidence shows that the pledging
system is not adequately securing resources and multi-stakeholder participation
for eradicating statelessness in all cases, but there are, nonetheless, some important
measures being taken toward this goal.
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