Grace 35 years old Nebbi District Grace is a 35-year-old woman who is married with six children. Like many Ugandans, she works as a farmer. Grace was able to successfully register for a national ID, but it was not easy. She had to abandon her work at home and leave her children for three days in a row. The queues were long, she told us, and the machines took several tries to register her fingerprints. Before the national ID, Grace told us, she had never been prevented from accessing a service before. But once the national ID became a requirement, she found that it was not so easy. She told us: Without a national ID, you cannot access health services. I had cough, headache and general body pain. I went to the government facility (Erussi HCII). When I reached the facility, I joined the queue. It took me three hours to reach the reception and they entered some of the information into the book and asked me for the ID and I told them that I had forgotten it back home. They told me that I should rush back home to pick the ID. I pleaded with them that I am very weak and could not manage to go back home and return to the facility. They refused totally. When it reached around midday, I was forced to go back home and did not come back to the facility. It is around one and a half kilometres from my home to the facility. I had walked there. Upon returning home, I just stayed home and the next day, I went to a drug shop and bought coartem [an antimalarial drug] of 500 shillings [500 UGX] and I recovered. Grace didn’t complain to anyone because she is not informed about where to take such complaints —and at the time of the incident she was feeling very weak. Grace tells us that it has always been difficult to access health services, which in places like Nebbi can be very crowded and under-resourced. She is optimistic that now that she has the national ID, things will be a bit better for her—if only because people from Congo will now be restricted from accessing the health services, minimizing the crowds. How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 53