card expensive and complex to administer. Meanwhile, many of the digital components of the system have not yet been widely utilized and are crippled by the limitations of both technology and administration. Biometric verification through fingerprint scanners regularly fails, particularly for older Ugandans whose fingerprints have been worn away due to years of manual labour. In any case, local health workers and community officials rarely have access to equipment such as fingerprint scanners or card readers. Programmes that have been able to make greater use of the biometric and digital components, such as the SCG, still require individuals over 80 years of age to physically travel to pay points to verify their identity. This leads to painful scenes where frail older persons are literally carried to payment points to verify their fingerprints. In one focus group in Nebbi, a person shared the account of an old man who was too sick to travel to an SCG distribution point. Programme officials insisted that, to receive his grant, he must be physically brought to the payment point to verify his fingerprint. But the trip ultimately proved too much for him and he passed away during the journey. The last payment due to him would customarily be given to family members after the beneficiary passes away. Therefore, officials took fingerprints off his dead body at the payment point for one last time. 6. Are the benefits really worth the costs? A question for the Ugandan government and international organizations and donors alike is whether the purported benefits of digital ID are actually worth the costs? One dimension of this question is the financial cost of Ndaga Muntu for the Ugandan government. Based on the limited data that is publicly available, we have calculated that the Ugandan government has invested at least 745 billion UGX (approximately $206 million USD using current exchange rates) in the national digital ID project over the past ten years.48 To compare, in that same time period, the government spent 770.1 billion UGX on the total budget for the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development (MGLSD).49 The total cost we calculated for the digital ID system is likely still a gross underestimation and does not include in-kind contributions from other government institutions, as well as civil society and international organizations, who all contributed to Ndaga Muntu in different ways. For example, the World Bank has contributed at least $10 million USD to NIRA through the Uganda Reproductive, Maternal and Child Health Services Improvement Project, alongside technical assistance from the Bank to both NIRA and the Ministry of Health.50 Meanwhile, the UK and Irish government have made major contributions in terms of development aid to the SCG cash transfer for older persons over the last decade, a programme that has been severely disrupted by the inability of older persons to obtain an NIC (required for access to the SCG) without errors. As the World Bank’s ID4D initiative, financed by the UK government and others,51 continues to be the world’s pre-eminent cheerleader of digital ID systems in developing countries, the question of the costs and benefits of digital ID systems are not merely relevant for the Ugandan government, but for the field of ‘sustainable development’ as a whole. Even more worrying than the size of the financial investment is the high cost paid by people who have been excluded following the introduction of Ndaga Muntu, as recounted in this report. This exclusion has particularly affected those who are already poor and How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 15