2. The Sustainable Development Goals and solutions to statelessness communities consistently show that they score poorly across all key indicators of human development, including longevity, education, gender equality, health, security and perceptions of well-being,27 and lag far behind when it comes to issues of multidimensional poverty, inequality and marginalisation. A recent report by UNHCR, ‘I am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to Address Childhood Statelessness’28 bears witness to these disparities through the testimony provided by more than 200 stateless children and youth around the world, showing how statelessness significantly impairs the ability of children to learn, grow, play and lead productive and fulfilling lives. It highlights how statelessness can create insurmountable barriers that prevent access to education and adequate health care and stifles job prospects. Statelessness can exact a devastating toll, not only on affected individuals but also on societies. As the UN Secretary General observed in his 2011 ‘Guidance Note on the United Nations and Statelessness’, “[e]xcluding entire sectors of a population can, for example, create social and political tensions and significantly impair efforts to promote economic and social development”.29 In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, the first post-independence nationality law in 1961 defined citizenship in a manner which excluded many residents who originally came from other parts of West Africa. Hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers who had been brought to Côte d’Ivoire from neighbouring countries in colonial times were thereby denied citizenship. This situation has been one of the root causes of a decade of armed conflict in the country. Statelessness has also had an economic impact as the political turmoil damaged the economy of the country, resulting in the loss of foreign investment and slowing of economic growth.30 The negative impact of statelessness on national development was 27 28 29 30 Finding Project, Left Behind: How Statelessness in the Dominican Republic Limits Children’s Access to Education, 2014; UNHCR, Mapping Statelessness in the United Kingdom, 2011; Open Society Justice Initiative and Refugees International, Without Citizenship: Statelessness, discrimination and repression in Kuwait, 2011; Lawyers for Human Rights, Statelessness and Nationality in South Africa, 2013. For an explanation of key human development indictors, see UNDP, supra n17. UNHCR, I am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to Address Childhood Statelessness, 2015. UN Secretary-General, Guidance Note of the Secretary General: The United Nations and Statelessness, 2011, p. 2. UCLA African Studies Centre, Côte d’Ivoire, 9 March 2015, http://www. international.ucla.edu/africa/article/96732. 52