Achieving Universal to ID:Access Gender-based Legal Barriers Against Women and Good Practice Reforms

For women and girls, legal identity is a stepping stone to empowerment, agency, and freedom of movement. This study explores how gender-based legal differences and nationality laws limit women’s ability to obtain identification for themselves, their children, and, in the case of nationality laws, their spouses too. It brings together data and analysis produced by agencies working on legal barriers that pertain to their mandates—for example, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on birth registration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on statelessness, and the evidence  produced by the World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law and other legal sources. Its aim is to  provide a comprehensive overview of the extent of gender-based legal barriers against women to ID and what is known about their impact on women, children, and excluded groups.