SDG 16.9: legal identity for all, and the role of digital ID
Target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals reads: "By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration." It is one of the shortest targets in the 2030 Agenda, and one of the most foundational, because so many other services depend on being able to prove who you are.
Legal identity is not the same as an ID card
The UN system distinguishes three things that are often blurred together:
- Civil registration: the continuous recording of vital events such as births, deaths and marriages by a civil registration authority. A birth certificate is its best-known output.
- Legal identity: in the UN's operational definition, the basic characteristics of a person's identity (such as name, sex, place and date of birth) conferred through registration and the issuance of a certificate by an authorised civil registration authority.
- Identity credentials: national ID cards, digital IDs, passports and similar documents that let a person prove their identity to others. They usually rely on civil registration as their foundation.
The UN Legal Identity Agenda, set up by UN agencies in 2018, promotes a "holistic" approach that links civil registration, vital statistics and identity management, so that a person is registered at birth, can obtain credentials based on that record, and is removed from the population register at death.
How the target is measured
The official indicator is 16.9.1: the proportion of children under five whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age. It is a narrow proxy for "legal identity for all", but a practical one, because it can be measured through household surveys and administrative data in most countries.
UNICEF's 2024 update, The Right Start in Life, found that 77% of children under five worldwide have had their births registered, up from 75% around 2019. That still leaves about 150 million children under five unregistered. The report also notes that tens of millions of children whose births are recorded do not have a birth certificate, the document that proves registration. Coverage is lowest in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
For adults, the World Bank's Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative estimates the number of people without official proof of identity; its most recent global estimates are in the hundreds of millions, concentrated in low-income countries, among women, and among the poorest households.
Why it matters for other goals
| Without proof of identity, a person may be unable to… | Related goal |
|---|---|
| Enrol in social protection or receive cash transfers | SDG 1 (poverty) |
| Register for school or sit national exams | SDG 4 (education) |
| Open a bank or mobile money account, or register a SIM card | SDG 8 and target 8.10 (financial services) |
| Inherit or register land | SDG 5 and target 1.4 |
| Prove age, and so be protected from child marriage or child labour | Targets 5.3 and 8.7 |
| Vote, or prove nationality and avoid statelessness | SDG 16 |
Death registration matters too. Without it, mortality statistics are incomplete, and the health data used to track SDG 3 lose precision. See the companion explainer on health data and the SDGs.
What the pandemic showed
COVID-19 tested identity systems in two ways. First, registration services were disrupted: offices closed and outreach stopped, and births went unregistered. Second, governments that needed to send emergency cash quickly found that their ability to do so depended on existing digital identity and payment records. Togo's Novissi programme, for example, used voter identification numbers and mobile money to pay informal workers remotely. Countries without comprehensive registers struggled to reach people who were not already in any database.
The lesson usually drawn is not that digital ID solves exclusion, but that identity, civil registration and payment systems need to be built before a crisis, with alternatives for those who are left out.
Digital identity: promises and safeguards
Many countries have moved to digital or biometric identity systems. They can make registration cheaper, reduce duplicate or fraudulent records, and let people prove their identity online. They also concentrate sensitive data and can exclude people whose fingerprints wear out, who lack connectivity, or who fear surveillance.
The Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development, first published in 2017 and endorsed by a range of international organisations, set out ten principles grouped under three headings:
- Inclusion: universal coverage and accessibility, free from discrimination and without undue barriers.
- Design: robust, secure, responsive and sustainable systems, built on open standards and avoiding vendor lock-in.
- Governance: protecting privacy and user rights through a comprehensive legal framework, with clear accountability and independent oversight.
Decentralised identifiers (DIDs)
A separate strand of work concerns "self-sovereign" or decentralised identity, in which people hold digitally signed credentials in a wallet and present only what is needed, for instance proof of being over 18 without revealing a date of birth. The World Wide Web Consortium published Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 as a Recommendation in 2022, alongside a data model for verifiable credentials. The EU's revised eIDAS framework, which introduces European Digital Identity Wallets, draws on similar ideas of selective disclosure.
These technologies address how credentials are presented, not whether a person was registered in the first place. A wallet is only as inclusive as the civil registration behind it. For target 16.9, the foundation remains birth registration.
Further reading
- UN metadata for indicator 16.9.1.
- UNICEF data on birth registration.
- Related explainers: the right to privacy at the UN, and affordable housing under SDG 11, where security of tenure is one of the five tests of a slum household.
Inclusion and rightsThe right to privacy at the UN
From Article 12 of the Universal Declaration to the Special Rapporteur: the texts and mechanisms that protect privacy.
Health and dataHealth data and the SDGs
What SDG 3 asks countries to measure, where the numbers come from, and why so many health systems still lack timely data.
Inclusion and rightsAssistive technology at work
Screen readers, braille displays and workplace adjustments: what exists, who has access, and the legal duties behind it.