restructured.101 This included automating the process of identifying eligible beneficiaries for the SCG and relying exclusively on data from NIRA’s National Identification Register (NIR). The Ministry for Gender, Labour and Social Development signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NIRA which allowed it access and permission to use NIRA data for the targeting of beneficiaries.102 At first, the PMU requested a list from the NIR of everyone who was above 55 years of age. From this list, the PMU selected the fifty oldest in each sub county and sent these lists to be verified by local leaders. Because the ESP programme staff found discrepancies between NIRA data and the 2014 census data, they assumed that many older people had not registered in the initial national ID registration drives.103 During this phase they reserved half of the places in the programme for the oldest residents, assuming they were the ones who had failed to register. Unfortunately, this mediated process is no longer in place. Today, the PMU relies solely on centralised data from NIRA to target beneficiaries who are older than 80 years of age, which means that anyone who has not registered for the national ID or who has not yet received their National ID will no longer be eligible for the programme. Ndaga Muntu: a targeting tool or an exclusionary tool? Ndaga Muntu is now the central tool for the targeting of older persons who are eligible for a modest (some would say, meagre) cash transfer. Problems with the national ID system has meant that for many older persons Ndaga Muntu is no longer a targeting tool but a tool of exclusion instead. There are five ways in which problems with Ndaga Muntu can exclude older persons from their right to social security. First, to become a new beneficiary of SAGE you must have completed the registration process for the national ID and have been successfully included in NIRA’s National Identity Register (NIR). As we have seen above, this has been especially problematic for older and poorer individuals. Research done by Makerere University supports this theory; their recent survey found that it was often those in the lowest wealth quintiles who were least likely to have a national ID,104 and further research suggests that the digital ID system has been, at best, poverty agnostic.105 Several senior sources have since confirmed to us that the preliminary data from an internal government data validation exercise indicates that at least 10,000 potential SCG beneficiaries do not have an NIC. Given the fact that UBOS projected that there are around 197,000 people in Uganda above 80 years old in 2021,106 this is both a significant level of exclusion as well as a likely undercount in light of the fact that we have estimated that the overall level of exclusion from the NIC in Uganda is between 23–33%. The second problem is that age must be captured and recorded accurately. As we have highlighted above, this was a major stumbling block for many older persons. Many parish chiefs reported that they knew of constituents with errors on their national ID. A chief in Kayunga told us that in his parish there were 82 beneficiaries with errors on their IDs. Another in Amudat said that “Most of the national IDs have errors, which renders them useless to beneficiaries.” As we found, most older persons whose age had been captured incorrectly by NIRA were deemed to be younger than they actually were. Whether this outcome was intentional or not is impossible for us to say, but it is certainly concerning. Older persons who are incorrectly deemed to be younger than 80 years in NIRA’s NIR are automatically How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 41