Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) are now unable to set their own policies on identifying beneficiaries. Instead, they must base decisions on NIRA’s data and issuance schedule. Local health workers and government officials are expected to enforce policies that require verification of an NIC and record the NIN, but they receive no tangible benefits for their programmes. They must insist on recording the national ID numbers of new mothers to provide notice of birth, but cannot help those same mothers obtain birth certificates for their children. They are left to face the backlash from their communities when national ID policies exclude people and degrade trust in the political system. One story we encountered during our field research may serve as a warning of the unintended consequences of the current approach to Ndaga Muntu. At one facility in Namayingo, Bukana Health Centre III, health workers refused to give medical care to a sick child whose mother could not produce her Ndaga Muntu. Only after the child had gone into convulsions and an enraged group of community members mobilized to gather at the health centre, did the health workers relent and agree to provide treatment. This incident forced the health centre staff to decide on their own local policy change: they would no longer strictly require the national ID in order to avoid further damaging their relationship with the local community. Similar outbursts of anger have been reported by parliamentarians and journalists.54 Many of the individuals we spoke to across Uganda are frustrated by Ndaga Muntu and it is difficult to predict how that frustration will be expressed over time. NIRA gained a new Executive Director, Rosemary Kisembo, in May 2021. She brings to the role the expertise in IT systems that President Museveni was seeking.55 She estimates that it will take another eight years to finish the registration processes and issue every Ugandan citizen with a NIN.56 Meanwhile, the government has also announced that it will replace all existing Ndaga Muntu cards by 2024 with a newer, more expensive card with an electronic chip.57 Not only will this require a significant additional investment to produce and issue these new cards, it is not at all clear how fancier technology will solve any of the existing problems in the system. Before the government invests any more funds and political capital into this system, we must ask: are the benefits worth the costs? *** This report will present some of the evidence that we have gathered through our research in Uganda over a period 7 months, with the hope that it will help inform the democratic debate about Ndaga Muntu moving forward. • In the first section, we briefly explain why we undertook this research and our focus and methodology. • In the second section, we share the experiences of older persons and women living in poverty across six districts of Uganda who have negatively encountered the integration of Ndaga Muntu system in two specific contexts: access to public health care for women and provision of the SCG. We argue that the accounts we share in this report raise urgent concerns from the perspective of the human right to health and social security. How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 17