Why Nigeria Must Prioritise Birth Registration – UNICEF

Why Nigeria Must Prioritise Birth Registration – UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), has said registering a child at birth could help in addressing population crisis in Nigeria.

UNICEF’s child protection specialist, Fatimah Adamu, while speaking during a two-day media dialogue in Kano Sate on Monday, said birth registration is the core part of identity document for every child.

Ms Adamu said the first right of every child is the identification of the child at birth which she noted can be done through birth registration.

“Birth registration helps in addressing a lot of issues like population, resource distributions, issues of planning, issues of access to services, hence it is important for every child to be registered at birth,” she said.

Ms Adamu said Nigeria is evolving from paper-based registration to digital birth registration which she described as a step forward “towards ensuring more children are registered at birth.”

She said UNICEF is providing support to Nigeria to ensure the success of the digital system.

Birth registration in Nigeria

Birth registration is the process of recording a child’s birth. It is a permanent and official record of a child’s existence which provides legal recognition of that child’s identity.

According to the 2021 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), only 57 per cent of children born in Nigeria are registered at birth with civil authorities.

The survey shows that Lagos State has the highest number of birth registration with 94 per cent, closely followed by the FCT with 87 per cent. States with the lowest registration are Jigawa with 23.6 per cent and Sokoto with 22.5 per cent.

The survey shows that three per cent of children under the age of five had their births registered, but do not have birth certificates.

It also indicates that two out of every three mothers and caregivers of children aged below five years whose births were not registered did not know how to register births.

It shows that the percentage of children under the age of five whose births are registered ranges from as high as 89 per cent for the richest wealth quintile to as low as 33 per cent for the poorest wealth quintile.