Though the situation across the globe has improved by 20 per cent in the past 10 years, a quarter of the world’s children under five years still do not own birth certificates.
Cameroon’s 2014 Multi Indicator Cluster Surveys, MICS report indicates that the birth registration rate of children under five which had been declining continuously over the past 20 years, moving from 70 per cent in 2006 to 61 per cent in 2011 experienced a slight increase to 66 per cent in 2014 at the national level. This might have been as a result of the amendment in 2011 of the Law on Civil Status, which increased the legal timeline for birth registration from 30 to 90 days.
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Worldwide, the number of children whose births are officially registered has increased significantly, yet 166 million children under five, or 1 in 4, remain unregistered, according to a report released by the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF on December 11, 2019. Entitled, “Birth Registration For Every Child By 2030: Are We On Track?” it analyses data from 174 countries. It says the proportion of children under five registered globally is up by about 20 per cent from 10 years ago, after increasing from 63 per cent to 75 per cent.
“A child not registered at birth is invisible – non-existent in the eyes of the government or the law. Without proof of identity, children are often excluded from accessing education, healthcare and other vital services, and are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse,” warned UNICEF Executive Director, Henrietta Fore. Global progress in birth registration was largely driven by great strides in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. But progress was also seen in West and Central Africa where under-five registration increased in 10 years from 41 per cent to 51 per cent – despite the multiple challenges that the region is facing.
In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, the proportion of children whose births are officially registered increased from 30 per cent in 2008 to 43 per cent in 2018, showing the value of integrating birth registration into health services. Francophone African countries such as Benin, Congo and Guinea Conakry have also made steady progress in improving national birth registration rates. In Cameroon, a pilot birth registration project in Bétaré-Oya in the East Region and Mokolo in the Far North Region launched by UNICEF in partnership with the National Office in charge of Civil Registration, BUNEC, and with the financial support of the European Commission, has proven efficient. And needs to be scaled up to ensure that all children in Cameroon can benefit from the best practices and good lessons learned, notes the report.
Nevertheless, barriers to birth registration Cameroon remain. The key bottlenecks include inadequate awareness amongst the population; insufficient quantity and quality of civil status personnel; insufficient supply of basic requirements; the use of non-official registers; high cost of certificates (whereas the law provides that they are issued free); and distance of civil status registries from the population.
UNICEF therefore calls for enhanced protection by providing every child with a certificate upon birth, empowering all parents to register their children at birth and for free during the first year of life, and linking birth registration to basic services such as health, social protection and education.
Also, the UN agency wants to see more investments in safe and innovative technological solutions to allow every child to be registered and the engagement of communities to demand birth registration for every child. “Every child has a right to a name, nationality and legal identity,” said Henrietta Fore.
Birth registration is the official recording of the occurrence and characteristics of a birth by the civil registrar within the civil registry, in accordance with the legal requirements of a country. A birth certificate is a vital record, issued by the civil registrar documenting the fact. Because it is a certified extract from the birth registration record, it proves that registration has occurred – making the document the first, and often only proof of legal identity, particularly for children.