Millions of world’s children lack any record of their births

In the developed world, birth certificates are often a bureaucratic certainty. However, across vast swaths of Africa and South Asia, tens of millions of children never get them, with potentially dire consequences in regard to education, health care, job prospects and legal rights. Young people without IDs are vulnerable to being coerced into early marriage, military service or the labour market before the legal age. In adulthood, they may struggle to assert their right to vote, inherit property or obtain a passport, the Assocaited Press reports. With the encouragement of Unicef and various non-governmental organisations, many of the worst-affected countries have been striving to improve their birth registration rates. In Uganda, volunteers go house to house in targeted villages, looking for unregistered children. Many babies are born at home, with grandmothers acting as midwives, so they miss out on the registration procedures that are being modernized at hospitals and health centres. By Unicef’s latest count, in 2013, the births of about 230 million children under age 5 – 35% of the world’s total – had never been recorded. Later this year, Unicef plans to release a new report showing that the figure has dropped to below 30 percent due to progress in countries ranging from Vietnam and Nepal to Uganda, Mali and Ivory Coast. While obtaining a birth certificate is routine for most parents in the West, it may not be a priority for African parents who worry about keeping a newborn alive and fed. Many parents wait several years, often until their children are ready for school exams, to tackle the paperwork. The West African nation of Mali is another success story. It’s now reporting a birth registration rate of 87% – one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – despite a long-running conflict involving Islamic extremists. In Somalia, wrecked by famine and civil war, the most recent registration rate documented by Unicef, based on data from 2006, was 3% – the lowest of any nation. In Myanmar, the overall registration rate has surpassed 70%, but is much lower in the western state of Rakhine, base of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority. Human rights agencies say many thousands of Rohingya children there have no birth certificates because of discriminatory policies. More broadly, there’s the massive problem of children without birth certificates or other identification who make up a significant portion of the millions of displaced people around the world, fleeing war, famine, persecution and poverty.