Nasarawa Schools As Springboard For Birth Registration

Any child that is not registered is lost, the child is without identity and the child is vulnerable to child trafficking, child labour and early marriage, says the National Population Commission (NPC).

Unfortunately, only 33 percent of children in Nigeria reportedly, have birth certificates.

The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2021 shows that about 1 in every 4 births of Nigerian children aged under 5 years are not registered.

According to MICS 2021, only 33 percent of these registered children have a birth certificate.

With the increasing realisation that registration of children at birth is one of the key elements to accelerate children’s rights, it has become necessary to ensure that every child is registered and is planned for by the government.

To this end, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is also supporting the Government of Nigeria through the National Population Commission, NPC to explore innovative measures and strategies to ensure every child that is born is registered at birth.

UNICEF) said registering a child at birth could help in addressing the population crisis in Nigeria.

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

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.

Meanwhile, to ensure that every child is registered and planned for by the government, schools in Nasarawa Local Government of Kano state have made birth certificate a criterion for enrolment of pupils into primary schools.

LEADERSHIP reports that the policy, since its introduction has become a game changer, improving massively on birth registration in the region.

During a visit to some schools in Nasarawa local government, Kano, LEADERSHIP observed that the locality could boost increased birthday registration as a result of the new policy which mandates parents to register their wards before enrolling them in school.

Malam Rabiu Mukhtar, the Education Secretary, Nasarawa local government said schools in the vicinity are making it mandatory for parents to register their children before being admitted to school.

Mukhtar said “On birth registration, even the parents are oriented, they are going by themselves collecting certificates because our policy is that before enrollment you have to tender the birth certificate.

“It is there in our admission register, that any child admitted into a school, his parents must present the certificate of birth so that it will go according to the age of the learner because we are considering the ages when we are enrolling them.”

On the issue of some children still roaming the streets of Kano, he said most of them are in school, the out of school children roaming the street, according to him, are mostly from neighboring states who fled due to insecurity.

“Kano state now is a state that is living peacefully without any security challenges but when you go to Katsina, Kaduna and nearest states are facing insecurity so their people are coming en masse that is where you are seeing them begging but inhabitants of the state are going to school.”

A pupil of Brigade school, located in Nasarawa local government, Zainab Yakubu who is 13 years old, said her parents presented her birth certificate before she was enrolled in the school.

While speaking during a two-day media dialogue on the new Country programme 2023-2027 and the status of implementation of the Child Rights Law 2003 in states in Kano, the Communication Specialist, Dr.  Geoffrey Njoku, said UNICEF had facilitated birth registration for 7.4 million children under the age of five.

He said the vision of 2023-2027 programme for Nigeria, is “to ensure that the rights of every child in Nigeria, especially the most excluded, to survive, thrive, learn, be protected and develop to his or her full potential.”