On 11 November 2021, a mobile civil-registration team set up desks at Ban Ton Chok School in Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand. More than ten migrant families waited to apply for “Person with No Registration Status” identification for their children. Fourteen-year-old Namfon and her mother prepared the required documents there.
From September 2021 to May 2022, the project planned visits to schools in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, and Mae Hong Son, aiming to assist around 32,000 stateless children. Thailand recorded about 539,000 stateless people in 2020; 297,000, or forty percent, were children.
Some children were recognised by schools and possessed student numbers yet did not legally exist in the civil-registration system. The school-based waiting process formed an entrance between those two systems.