ID4Africa 2026: Delegates Agree Legal Identity Is An Urgency

It’s time for African governments to speed up efforts aimed at creating the enabling conditions that provide legal and digital identity for all citizens, including refugees and stateless persons living on their territories. This was the main call to action by several speakers during a session on legal identity on the final day of the ID4Africa 2026 AGM on May 15. The event, which ran from May 12-15 in Abidjan, saw presentations and panel discussions from nearly 200 speakers, drawn from Africa and beyond. Cameroon was among countries with participating delegates. The topics were deep and diverse, with the main goal being to advance the conversation around Africa’s digital identity journey. Identity authorities from several countries as well as representatives of some human rights and international development organizations like the World Bank, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and UNICEF, participated in discussions aimed at strengthening legal and digital identity. Speakers proposed concrete steps to get this done in line with the SDG 16.9 target which calls on every nation to provide legal identity to everyone, including birth registration, by 2030, as well as the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) agenda. One of the points that came out strongly during the exchanges was the emphasis on making the linkage of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) with national ID systems more coherent, streamlined and urgent. There are an estimated 4.4 million stateless persons in the world, and about 800 million people globally still without legal identity. Birth registration has seen some progress in the last few years, but a region like Sub Saharan Africa still seriously lags behind...