An Evaluation of Pledges to Eradicate Statelessness in the SADC GCR. Efforts made toward the eradication of statelessness are often manifestations of pre-existing national, regional, or international projects that may or may not be expressed through a pledge. Mauritius, for example, reported at the Preparatory Meeting in 2019 that 99.7% of children were registered at birth, and that all cases of late birth registration were referred to and solved by the Civil Status Office and the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare. Many of the Forum pledges made in the region were by the UN Country Team (UNCT), who committed to support or continue supporting governments. Their work is facilitatory, and progress often reflects ongoing efforts and not necessarily novel initiatives made through the pledging system. This facilitatory relationship shows that there is collaboration between states and development actors – a key aim of the GCR. Yet in the case of statelessness, states must maintain a central role in addressing systemic exclusion. The UNCT in Angola helped launch a registration and documentation exercise in 2023 to pave the way for greater access to services as well as social and economic integration. In Luanda, 1,041 refugees with expired documentation had been re-registered (UNCT, 2023: 25). Further, authorities announced that all asylum seekers processed before 2015 would be automatically recognized. Beginning in 2020, legislative reform was introduced to allow the civil registration and issuance of ID cards to about 4 million unregistered individuals who hold a voter’s card and appear in the electoral roll (Offerman, 2022: 9). States engage in regular legislative reform to address gaps in their nationality laws that have the effect of reducing statelessness. While reform such as this is situated within the larger global and regional efforts to eradicate statelessness and institutionalize multi-stakeholder participation, the pledging system is not necessarily a sine qua non for this reform. A major cause of statelessness is discriminatory nationality laws that result in direct or indirect exclusion. While not in line with any specific pledge, Madagascar in 2019 removed gender discrimination from its nationality law and allowed women to confer nationality on their children on an equal basis with men. Gender discrimination in the conferral of nationality is one of the leading causes of statelessness and takes concerted legislative effort to alleviate. However, as the pledging system and the GCR are voluntarist, the system’s ability to galvanize legislative and policy reform that is not already in progress may be muted. The pledging system is designed for the making and monitoring of pledges and other progress. As pledging and the GCR are voluntary, there is no institutional form of accountability or enforcement. Pledges can thus be made and remade at succeeding events, without making any progress. In 2011, Zambia pledged to accede to the 1961 Statelessness Convention, then again in 2019 at the High-Level Segment and has still not become a state party. The implementation of pledges is often hamstrung by the slow incrementality of bureaucracy and the mercuriality of changing administrations. The vast majority of pledges made toward statelessness in the Southern African region are listed as in the planning stage or in progress. Arguably, as the GCR is built atop a developmental approach, progress should be measured in the long term. However, 125