The rhetoric vs. the reality “The goal of the ID4D is for all people to be able to access services and exercise their rights, enabled by digital identification. ID4D directly supports countries to achieve Sustainable Development Target 16.9 and in making progress towards dozens of other targets such as poverty elimination, reduced inequalities, gender equality and women’s empowerment, safe and orderly migration, universal health coverage, and financial inclusion, among others.” The World Bank Situated within the wider Sustainable Development Agenda, the provision of legal identity is understood as offering a gateway to rights and services. This rhetoric largely bypasses the issue of nationality, which is both an integral part of a person’s legal identity and through its function as a regulatory mechanism defining obligations and commitments between citizens and their state, often serves as the primary condition to full civil participation and access to the rights and services. Amina Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary General and member of the ID4D High Level Advisory Council has emphasised the devastating effects of statelessness (lack of any nationality) for the Sustainable Development Goals:“Statelessness makes people invisible. When people are unable to prove their identity, they may be unable to access basic services like education and health care. Statelessness can deny people and communities their identity and sense of self, contributing to the breakdown of family and social relationships and creating legal problems for generations. And stateless people are voiceless people. Prevented from voting or participating in public life, they are without representation anywhere.” The situation in the Dominican Republic clearly demonstrates how birth registration alone does not always equate to full – or even improved – civil participation or access to welfare and other services. The birth registration system was adapted to enable a process of locking thousands of people out of access to citizenship and the protections and rights that come with it. In a context of wmass denial and deprivation of citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, a new ‘Foreign’ registry book was introduced. Many people saw their birth record transferred to this Foreign register, which meant that while they still had a ‘legal identity’ in the narrow sense of birth registration, they were no longer treated as citizens. This disqualified them from accessing education, employment and social welfare on equal terms with others. Providing legal identity without paying due attention to citizenship will undermine the inclusion that SDG16.9 actually seeks to facilitate. It seems that this important message has been lost from the legal identity for all agenda, overshadowed by the push to roll out sophisticated technological solutions. Nationality (and statelessness) must claim a place in the development discourse if SDG16.9 is to contribute to the wider ambitions to leave no one behind and to reach the furthest behind first. Digital solutions to legal identity? The evolution of the discourse around SDG 16.9 makes it clear that the main priority of the key players is to invest in digital technologies. However, there are two important considerations that need to be addressed before digitalisation can be implemented in a way that is compatible with the guiding principle of the SDG Agenda to leave no one behind. First, it is important to ensure that the underlying legislative and policy structures that determine legal identity are not discriminatory or arbitrary. Otherwise, even a well-designed digital solution will replicate exclusionary practices already in place, not only leaving those unable to obtain documentation even further behind but effectively locking them out from the system for good. Serious concerns were raised on this question at the ISI World Conference on Statelessness in June 2019. Melanie Khanna, the Chief of UNHCR's Statelessness Section, noted that “There is a risk that people who have been blending in in a setting where ID coverage is weak may effectively become more differentiated […] There is a legitimate protection concern there. “ 3