Exclusion by design: how national ID systems make social protection inaccessible to vulnerable populations
To be effective and serve their universal aims, such programmes must be accessible to all without discrimination. However, a growing number of programmes require their beneficiaries to produce a form of ID in order to unlock access – a requirement that invariably reduces or denies access to welfare to certain parts of the population. This can be for a variety of reasons, almost all of which come down to the fact that some categories of individuals cannot obtain a piece of ID in the first place: specific marginalised groups are by default or by design excluded from ID access, either because distribution logistics fail or technical features of the system make certain requirements impossible to evidence for some. For example, ID relying on biometrics may inevitably exclude the elderly and manual workers, whose fingerprints fade over time.
(Which would include me—the fingerprint thing. Mine fade to uselessness in the winter.)
There are a lot of good reasons to be wary of immunity passports and one of them is this: that they create yet one more governmentally endorsed division between haves and have-nots.
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