SOLVING STATELESSNESS care and social welfare entitlements.53 For example, in Kenya, a national identity card (ID card) is often required to demonstrate citizenship and thereby access goods and services. A national ID card is necessary to be admitted to hospital, to enrol in university, to vote, to open a bank or mobile money account, to get married, to obtain a passport and access many other services. Although Kenyan law sets out the various ways in which an individual may acquire Kenyan nationality, it also allows the officials responsible for processing ID applications significant discretion to defer or deny applications or to demand additional forms of documentation, such as parents’ or grandparents’ birth or death certificates, affidavits from tribal elders, or school leaving, madrassa or baptismal certificates.54 This discretion has enabled pervasive discrimination against certain groups, such as the Nubians and Somalis, whose legal entitlement to nationality is often eroded by their inability to secure documentary proof of their legal identity. Target 16.9 can also be helpful in the case of stateless persons in a migratory context,55 for example, expatriates who lose or who are deprived of their nationality without having acquired the nationality of their country of habitual residence, as it can support arguments for the identification and protection of such individuals through formal recognition as stateless persons until they are able to acquire a nationality. Most stateless populations living in a migratory situation remain invisible, unrecognised and undocumented, making their existence precarious.56 Stateless persons should be afforded a broad range of civil, economic, social and cultural rights as set out in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons57 and 53 54 55 56 57 See, Govil, supra n35. B. Oppenheim and B.M. Powell, Legal Identity in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Lessons from Kiera, Kenya, Open Society Justice Initiative Policy Paper, 2015. The vast majority of stateless individuals are found in their “own country”, that is the country with which they have long-established ties, usually because of long-term residence or birth. For these in situ populations, the best course of action is for States to undertake targeted nationality campaigns with the objective of resolving the situation through grant of nationality and the issuance of national identity documentation to such populations if necessary. See UNHCR, Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, 2014, paras. 58-59. See, for example, UNHCR, Mapping Statelessness in the United Kingdom, supra n26. Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, 28 September 1954, entry into force 6 June 1960, 360 UNTS 117. 59