This TED Talk features legal identity expert Kristen Wentz, recorded live at We the Future 2019.

So when I was 14, my family was in the process of adopting my little brothers from Ethiopia.

And one day my mom asked, what day should we put for their birthday?

The day they were born, obviously?

Ridiculous question.

And then my mom said, well, Kristen, neither of your little brothers have a birth certificate.

So how do you suggest we find out when that was?

Mine blown.

Now, 20 years later, I'm still working on it,

except instead of trying to solve the mystery of my brother's missing birth certificates,

I tried to solve this problem globally. So what do birth certificates have to do with international development? To answer that, we have to look back at the original development agenda,

the human rights agenda.

So in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the first time, set a shared vision of basic human rights and dignities that apply to all people and all nations.

Article 6. The right to be recognized as a person before the law, or a legal

identity. For children, this is a birth certificate. And despite this being a universal human right,

one billion people today have no record they exist, making it one of the greatest human rights

violations of our time, yet nobody seems to know about it.

In the face of world poverty and hunger, making sure everyone in the world has a legal identity doesn't

really seem important, but in reality it is. See, early in my career, I was working with a social

worker in a slum community in Mumbai,

and we were falling up on a case with this little girl who had contracted polio as a baby

and was paralyzed from the waist down. When we arrived at the home, we found her on the floor.

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