World Bank data sets in the last few years have magnified the sheer volume of people who simply cannot prove who they are. While the stark figure of 1 billion people living without an ID has decreased to around 850 million, UNDP is involved with partners on a collaborative vision for legal identity.
Niall McCann, of the UNDP, discusses the downstream of consequences that not having a legal form of ID has on their daily lives and accessibility to services.
“A birth certificate is the gold standard of legal identity and the priorities should always be to register people at the closest point to their birth as possible”.
Niall shared the UNDP’s scepticism about prioritising the issuance of identity documentation for adults because there should be holistic approach for the whole lifecycle from birth to death.
The UN Legal Identity project also makes a real difference in third countries like Honduras where the programme is focused on providing identity visibility for displaced peoples, minorities, refugees, the LGBTQI+ community and people with disabilities.
