Still Waiting

Nosizi Dube had done what a promising student is asked to do. She had worked hard at school. She had earned the chance to continue. Yet, growing up in Kenya’s stateless Shona community, she repeatedly faced an obstacle that good marks could not remove: she lacked the documents required to prove her identity.

In UNHCR’s account, first published in November 2020, each stage of her education brought another difficulty. Reaching university required intervention from UNHCR and the Kenya Human Rights Commission. The University of Nairobi exceptionally allowed her to enroll using her birth certificate. During pandemic restrictions, she traveled roughly 20 kilometers to the commission’s offices to use the internet for her classes.

There is so much life inside that account: the work already done, the future within reach, the need to keep asking for an opening. Reading it, I find myself thinking about the time a person must spend proving that they should be allowed to begin.

Her experience belongs to her. The humiliation, hope, or exhaustion I might imagine cannot be put into her mouth. The documented facts are powerful enough. A capable young woman needed an exception to enter a university that had already recognized her academic promise. Access depended on other people helping her through the next administrative door.

The scale beyond her story is enormous. The World Bank’s 2025 identification dataset, drawing on 2024 data, estimates that approximately 800 million people worldwide lack official identification. It also estimates that at least 2.8 billion people lack access to a government-recognized digital identity for secure online transactions. These groups overlap. Together, the figures reveal how much of ordinary participation depends on being able to establish who you are in the form a system accepts.

I think about the moments those numbers cannot record. Someone takes time away from work to visit an office. Someone borrows enough money for the journey. Someone asks a relative to watch a child. The counter closes before their turn. These are imagined situations, not additional details about Nosizi. They describe the kinds of practical demands we should remember whenever we speak casually about completing a process.

An hour of waiting has different meanings in different lives. For a person with savings and flexible work, it may be an inconvenience. For someone who loses income each time they leave their stall, workshop, or shift, it can reach into the evening meal. The same requirement can ask very different things of the people standing before it.

That is why I am drawn to the space between an opportunity being announced and a person being able to use it. An announcement travels quickly. It can fit in a headline. Using the opportunity may require transport, information, signatures, money, patience, and a sequence of things done in the right order. The person reading the good news still has to find a way through tomorrow.

Waiting also changes the future while it passes. A place on a course may be available for only so long. A customer may need an answer this week. A family’s circumstances may change before a decision arrives. When we say that someone can apply, we should be curious about whether the opening will still be there when the process ends.

The importance of recognition continues after a document is issued. UNHCR’s report on the Shona community’s 2024 survey describes changes in financial inclusion, access to services, and people’s sense of their future following citizenship. That later account concerns the community; it does not tell us how Nosizi’s individual life unfolded. It reminds me that paperwork can become meaningful through the ordinary things people can finally do.

Open an account. Take an exam. Make a plan that extends beyond the next visit to an office. These actions are easy to overlook when they have always been available. Their absence can shape an entire childhood or narrow the choices of an entire household.

I also wonder what it feels like to have completed a difficult process and then be asked to begin again. Imagine keeping a folder because you cannot quite trust that the last approval will be enough next time. The copies remain carefully ordered. The messages stay on your phone. You learn to carry evidence of your own life, just in case. This is an imagined image of uncertainty, not a claim about any one administrative system.

It is this uncertainty that holds my attention: how much of a person’s energy goes into keeping an opening available, and how much remains for the life they hoped to build through it. Every repeat visit competes with something else that matters. We should be able to see those competing demands when we judge whether a process works.

I return to Nosizi’s story because she kept moving toward her education. Others helped make a way through. That effort deserves recognition, along with the question it leaves behind: how many people have the same promise, but no one beside them when the next door needs opening?

I want a world where the arrival of permission brings something a person can use. A future should not remain on the other side of the counter while the person who earned it keeps waiting.