Why parents should register children’s birth

The country’s laws provides that all births must be registered within 60 days.The Vital Registration department of the National Populations Commission (NPopC) was the driver of this crucial demographic data gathering process that is supposed to record an individual entry into and departure out of life.The Chairman of NPopC Eze Duruiheoma while speaking at an […]

The country’s laws provides that all births must be registered within 60 days.
The Vital Registration department of the National Populations Commission (NPopC) was the driver of this crucial demographic data gathering process that is supposed to record an individual entry into and departure out of life.
The Chairman of NPopC Eze Duruiheoma while speaking at an orientation programme on birth registration recently  said “Vital statistic provides government with information on measures, trends/patterns of fertility and mortality, data on education, health, social security, insurance among others.”
According to the convention on the rights of the child, lack of birth registration is a violation of the inalienable right- a right to an identity at birth. The convention stipulates that “the child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for”.
Whereas the NPopC was established by law to handle Census and vital registration, the government funding towards the activities of vital registration has been abysmal.
These development has confined the collections of vital registrations to the background with the country struggling with just about 50 percent coverage.
There are at present, over 35 thousand medical facilities in the country manned by barely four thousand registrars with an average of five centers in every local government.
Experts have stressed that Statistics on vital events gives legal and documentary evidence to certify a person’s age, birth place and citizenry.
It also enables a person’s eligibility for voting, obtaining a passport, employment, health care, and admission into school, amongst other benefits in Nigeria.
The 2013 Demographic Health Survey indicates that birth registration of under five children is 57 percent, while the remaining 43 percent remain unregistered and in legal terms do not exist.
One reason for this disparity is due to the ignorance of mothers and care givers on the importance of registration.
Duru Iheoma added that: “The problem is compounded by the fact that three in every five births (62 percent of all birth) occur at home and only 35 percent of births in the country are delivered in health facilities.”
Given the challenge of attaining the 100 percent registration by 2015, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) entered into strategic partnership with NPopC to develop messages that will greatly ameliorate the daunting challenges of ignorance and inadequate enlightenment that is posing a serious challenge to our country’s effort at attaining 100 percent.
The collaboration which is already yielding great result culminated in the lunch of the ‘RapidSMS’ technology which allows for real time tracking and monitoring of the performance of states and local government.
In the three years since the initial bottleneck analysis, 13 million children have been registered according to the RapidSMS data.
The success with RapidSMS notwithstanding, government cannot continue to remain avast to funding statistics as current activities of NPopC rely almost completely on donor agencies.
Concerns have also been raised about having different systems for registration which can be confusing for the families. In Nigeria, the churches, health clinic, local government and NPopC all carry out birth registration.
These duplicity arising from multiple constitutional responsibility, makes some children  registered in one system or the other, some in two, some in neither.  Neither any is continuous or accurate hence the need to improve the quality of the registry.
Registrars in the field have also complained about the workload. In more than 10 percent of local government, NPopC registrars are responsible for huge geographic areas (900 km square) or a population of over 3450 births per year or both. Bringing these human resource gap is vital to the success of the exercise.
NPopC is also faced with additional burden of providing NPopC certificate to people previously registered only with the Local Government Education Authority (LGEA)  system and updating the National registry to account for LGEA record which would also require additional human resource.
Sharon Oladiji, A child protection specialist with UNICEF who spoke to The Home Front also emphasized the need to keep legislative reform for birth registration on the agenda.
She said: “Durable changes to federal legislation or constitution will require more work and likely time, waiting for these changes should not impede implementation at the federal and state level”.
The NPopC and UNICEF choose religious leaders from 24 institutions (12 churches and 12 mosques) in the six area councils in the Federal Capital territory who initiated a pilot to encourage the integration of birth registration services into religious messages.
This model has to be rapidly replicated in other states of the federation and government must make effort to strengthen these partnership.
This Sharon stressed would help redirect charitable resources to support birth registration activities within religious institution.
The NPopC and UNICEF at the workshop also emphasis the huge role of the Media  to attain   100 percent birth registration in 2015.
Dr Isiaka Yahaya of NPopC in his presentation said: “The media must provide  illustrative information that will trigger popular participation.”Registration of birth and death is a developmental issue that deserve the front burner of national discourse”, he said.
Just like Mrs Zainab Mahmoud of NPopC  said, “the children are not the commission children but that of the country and as such every stake holder must take ownership of birth registration in the country.”