“I am Mbalenhle and I don’t exist. I’m stateless. Sometimes to be undocumented I think is a curse. Your life is just stuck in a one-way. You can’t even move on with your life.”
These are the words of a young girl featured in a video shot by the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town – an NGO working with migrants, asylum seekers and refugees – and B-Yond TV.
Scalabrini recently published research on foreign children who have migrated to South Africa from other African countries. According to the report, a large portion of the children participating in the study – 39% – have no documentation, placing them at a high risk of being stateless.
A stateless person is someone who is not considered a national by any state under its law.
According to Scalabrini’s research, which was conducted in Limpopo, the Western Cape and Gauteng, the problem of undocumented children was at its worse in Limpopo, where 85% were undocumented.
