*EPF315 06/05/2002
Birth Registration Critical in Providing for Children, UNICEF Says
(Report says millions of babies unregistered) (1060)

By Judy Aita
Washington File United Nations Correspondent

United Nations -- Millions of babies around the world go unregistered at birth shutting the door to a whole range of rights and opportunities throughout their lives, according to a new report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Without a birth certificate -- or what UNICEF calls "a membership card for society" -- children may be denied such rights as education, health care and protection, UNICEF said. In later life, the unregistered child may be unable to apply for a formal job or passport, open a bank account, get a marriage license, stand for elective office or vote.

The report, entitled "Birth Registration -- Right from the Start," estimates that 50 million babies, or 41 percent of births worldwide, were not registered in the year 2000. In 19 countries at least 60 percent of all children under the age of 5 were not registered at birth, the report said.

"A birth certificate is one of the most important pieces of paper a person will ever own," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy. "If we do not get it right from the start and register babies, it is an uphill battle from there on. Unregistered children lack the most basic protection against abuse and exploitation and become a more attractive commodity to a child trafficker, illegal adoption rings, and others who seek to take advantage of their non-status."

Marta Santos Pais, director of UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center, which prepared the report, said at a press conference June 4 that the report dramatically illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

Unregistered children are invisible in societies today, Pais said. "We believe that when they are not counted, they seem not to count in policy planning and policy making. It is very difficult to plan how best to allocate resources for children if we do not know how many there are.

"How can we ensure their access to school if they cannot prove that they exist as persons? How can they be protected from exploitation, from trafficking, from being forced to participate in conflicts or to get married before the minimum age if they cannot prove their age," she said.

The 32-page report illustrates the depth of the problem worldwide, but also highlights countries that have found highly successful ways to address the problem.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over 70 percent of births, about 17 million children, were unregistered in 2000, the report said. South Asia had the highest number of unregistered children overall with about 22.5 million or over 40 percent of the world's unregistered births. Throughout South Asia, 63 percent of births were unregistered.

"In the Middle East and North Africa, nearly one-third of the children born in 2000 (or some three million) lacked legal recognition of their identity, while in the East Asia and Pacific region 22 percent of births in 2000 -- some seven million children -- were unregistered," the report said.

The data was obtained through door-to-door surveys conducted by the Innocenti Center and organizations in individual countries, and then correlated with government data as part of the review for the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children held May 8-10, 2002.

"It is the most complete and updated data internationally on this particular issue," Santos said. "It gives the sense of an important challenge for the international community."

Santos calls the data "worrying" because governments have not included those children in planning for immunization, schooling or other subsidies. In addition, she said, "this may be the tip of the iceberg, because this is approximate data. There may be more."

Countries where significant numbers of children are unregistered are Rwanda, where birth registration was over 80 percent in 1973, but certificates were used by genocide killers in 1994; Cambodia, where registration records were destroyed under the Pol Pot regime; and Niger, where only 45 percent of births are registered with an even lower percentage among the nomadic population. UNICEF also estimates that in China the number of unregistered children may be as high as six million.

The "high achievers" in birth registration include Algeria, with 97 percent birth registration. Malaysia, Mauritius and Uzbekistan also high numbers of birth registration. Other countries that have made birth registration a major priority include Bangladesh, East Timor, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Namibia and Uganda, the report said.

"Whenever there has been a very clear political commitment to make it work, campaigns have been launched, departments have been engaged through the government and local authorities," Santos said. "Nongovernmental organizations and churches, community leaders, religious leaders have been associated in some countries."

Santos added, however, that "the challenges are endless," pointing out that there is insufficient political commitment by some governments; poor roads and transportation make birth registration centers, which are often located in urban areas, inaccessible; registration fees are often too high for poor families; and some countries have laws that stigmatize unmarried mothers.

Nevertheless, Santos said, "there are many good solutions that have been tried in many poor countries, and when they have worked well it has been possible to change dramatically the reality from half of the children to 80 percent of children registered."

A good example of a country where a head of state and government departments took a very serious stand to ensure children are registered is Uganda, she said.

"The president of Uganda, in his inaugural statement in 2001, took birth registration as a national priority. We see now thousands of children being registered in the country through a very decentralized process and very active engagement in the society," Santos said.

In Angola, birth registration campaigns have shown that despite the devastation of a lengthy civil war, demand for birth registration can be extremely high. The first four months of a campaign begun in 2001 saw more than 230,000 children registered and was so successful that at one point the government ran out of documents, she noted.

"Our hope is that, as countries have committed themselves less than a month ago here in New York at the Special Session on Children, at the end of the decade all children will be registered, and, in fact, will be better protected from exploitation from abuse and given greater chance of access to school, to health and social protection," Santos said.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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