PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN’S FUND

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN’S FUND

A new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) -- “Birth Registration - Right from the Start” -- estimates that 50 million births were not registered in the year 2000.  That posed difficulties regarding access to education and health care, as well as legal protection, Marta Santos Pais told correspondents at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon. 

Ms. Pais, Director of UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, was introduced by Alfred Ironside, Head of the Communications Division, UNICEF, and joined by Gopalan Balagopal, Senior Adviser, UNICEF’s Child Protection Programme Division.

She said that it was difficult to plan how best to allocate resources for children, if governments did not know just how many of them there were.  How could they be ensured access to schools if they could not prove their existence?  How could they be protected from exploitation, trafficking, participating in combat and forced early marriages if they could not prove their age? 

The report illustrated the magnitude of the problem, as well as the best solutions to address it, she said.  Where there was clear political will, campaigns had been launched and governmental departments and civil society had been engaged.  Latin America, as a region, had committed to ensure free universal birth registration by 2005.  She hoped that by the end of the decade all children would be registered and, thereby, better protected. 

Using the example of Bangladesh, Mr. Balagopal illustrated why birth registration was so important.  A UNICEF survey in 1996 showed that the number of children actually registered was very limited -- less than 10 per cent.  Among the consequences of non-registration were the early marriages of girls, lack of legal protection for children under a certain age, and difficulty in repatriating children rescued from trafficking, due to lack of proof of nationality. 

While there were laws on the books regarding registration, they had fallen into disuse, he continued.  What worked in Bangladesh was the leadership in the de-centralized locations, where individuals took specific initiatives to ensure that birth registration was made easy and accessible.  With UNICEF’s help, more than 4.5 million children that had not been registered from 1997 to the present had now been registered.

Responding to questions, Ms. Pais said that the data contained in the report had been gathered from 70 household surveys conducted at the community level within developing countries by UNICEF in partnership with other actors, particularly national partners.  It was the most updated and complete data compiled so far on the issue.  Some regions particularly affected included South Asia, which had more than 40 per cent of the world’s unregistered children, and sub-Saharan Africa, which had more than 70 per cent of Africa’s unregistered children.

Among the difficulties, she noted, was a lack of awareness of the advantages of having identification.  Insufficient political will was another challenge.  Other barriers included outdated legislation and the stigma associated with unwed

mothers, as well as high registration fees and difficulty accessing registration centres.

There was a clear duty on the part of governments, she added.  One hundred and ninety-one countries had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which very clearly identified the obligation to provide for a system of birth registration for all children immediately after birth.  The report highlighted successful solutions that could be replicated in that regard.

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