Author This report was written by Bronwen Manby. Recommended citation Manby, Bronwen. “Statelessness and Digital Identity: Beyond ‘Inclusion’ as a Metric for an Acceptable Identification System.” Caribou, December 2025. https://caribou.global/publications/statelessness-and-digital-identity. DOI: 10.64329/VCFZ8386 Caribou is a global consultancy working with ambitious foundations, companies, and governments to accelerate and deliver impact in a digital age by applying deep technical expertise and rigor to fund and program management, strategy and policy design, impact measurement, actionable research, and immersive learning initiatives. Caribou works towards a world in which digital economies are inclusive and sustainable, driven by secure livelihoods, innovative business models, and resilience to a changing climate. www.caribou.global This report was produced by Caribou in partnership with the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH. The views presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH. Accessibility This PDF has been designed using Adobe’s PDF accessibility evaluation tool, a checklist of considerations to support compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, among the most comprehensive and widely-used accessibility standards for digital content. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Readers are encouraged to reproduce material from this project for their own publications, as long as they are not being sold commercially. We request due acknowledgment and, if possible, a copy of the publication. For online use, we ask readers to check for updates and to link to the original resource on the project website. Cover image © Klein Ongaki for Privacy International