sufficient. While national identity cards are completely routine in many countries in the world, especially those belonging to the civil law tradition (including former French, Spanish and Portuguese territories), they are less likely to exist in countries where the common law heritage is dominant (former British territories—except those where passes were imposed on the “native” population). There remains strong resistance to the idea of such a requirement in the UK itself, as well as in the USA. “While national identity cards are completely routine in many countries in the world… they are less likely to exist in countries where the common law heritage is dominant” The discussion of these objectives and what they imply has been complicated by the sudden availability of relatively affordable digital and biometric technology, from electronically recorded fingerprints and iris scans, to the mysteries of the “blockchain” and the world of virtual online identities. Biometric features are rapidly being incorporated into government-backed identity cards, while private-sector-led initiatives are attracting public funds for decentralized identification not necessarily linked to government identity documents—such as the ID2020 Alliance (led by the private sector but involving UN agencies) “to empower individuals, enable economic opportunity and advance global development by increasing access to digital identity” (ID2020 Alliance 2017). These developments have fueled a wave of publications on the “identification revolution” and the role of digital identity in “leapfrogging” the legacy of paper-based systems (World Bank 2016; Gelb and Diofasi Metz 2018). The World Bank has led a process of adopting a set of “principles on identification” to serve as standards in order to “maximiz[e] the benefits of identification systems for sustainable development while mitigating many of the risks” (Desai et al. 2017) Trends in identification systems in Africa Many, if not most, Africans do not currently hold any state-issued document that is official proof of their existence, or of their citizenship of the state to which they “belong”. An average of 56 percent of sub-Saharan African children under five years old did not have birth registration as of 2013 (85 million children), a critical step for the access of those children to many government services as well as the establishment of their rights as adults. In at least eight countries (Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, Somalia, Tanzania and Zambia), less than 20 percent of children had been registered (UNICEF 2013). In line with the SDG agenda, a central part of recent efforts to strengthen state capacity in Africa has thus been to strengthen identification systems, including both civil registration of births and deaths (and significant civil status events in between: marriages, divorces, adoptions) and population registries backed by the issue of a national http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 55