SOLVING STATELESSNESS of five. Further, Global Indicator 16.9.1 will not help the millions of children and adults75 who lack legal identity and who may be left out of measures that focus on ensuring birth registration for those under the age of five. Indeed, a measure of birth registration on its own provides a limited and inaccurate picture of who has legal identity and who does not.76 In countries which require a national ID in order to prove nationality and thereby access rights and services, a single measure to track implementation of Target 16.9, such as that provided in Global Indicator 16.9.1, poses a challenge. However, creating an additional Global Indicator is not the solution, because an appropriate measure in one country would not necessarily be appropriate for other national contexts.77 Indeed, creating a new Global Indicator that would, for example, measure the proportion of a country’s population over the age of the 18 that holds national identity cards, could lead to States adopting more formalised and thus potentially more restrictive systems with respect to the issuing of national IDs, making it even more difficult for certain groups to gain access to such documentation. This could inadvertently expose more people to the risk of statelessness and potentially aggravate the impact of statelessness by making those without an ID more noticeable. Strengthening nationality documentation systems without critically assessing and responding to the broader governance context can lead to a number of consequences that further entrench exclusion and thereby undermine development gains. Action 8 of the GAP (which is the #IBelong Campaign’s partial correlate to Target 16.9), requires that those with an entitlement to nationality are able to acquire documentary proof of nationality. Accordingly, it may be most appropriate for supplementary countryspecific indicators to be established in those countries which impose proof-of-nationality requirements and for these indicators to be administered through national censuses or other periodic population surveys such as the United States Agency for International Development supported Demographic and Health Surveys. 75 76 77 For example, it was reported that 750 million children under the age of 16 were without birth registration in 2014. See, C. Dunning, A. Gelb and S. Raghavan, Birth registration, Legal Identity and the Post-2015 Agenda, Centre for Global Development 2014, Policy Paper 046. See, González López, et al., supra n50, p. 1. Ibid. 67