E-birth Registration Crucial To Children Survival, Nation Building — UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has called on Nigerians and government at all levels to fully key into the e-birth registration process for the good and future of the country’s children.

The Chief of UNICEF Field Office for South West Nigeria, Celine Lafoucriere who made the call said the digitised-birth registration is very crucial to building an inclusive society.

Lafoucriere, stated this in Lagos at the opening of a 2-day media dialogue to drive e-birth registration in the Southwest of Nigeria.

The dialogue, organised by the Lagos State Ministry of Youth & Social Development, with the theme: “Giving Every Child a Legal Identify,” was held in conjunction with the National Population Commission (NPC) and UNICEF.

Speaking further on the importance of the e-birth registration, the UNICEF boss said, “Birth registration is a fundamental right for every child, without that, a child is invisible. With this, children have access to to basic services, very importantly, they have access to services such as projection, healthcare, education and many others.”

Lafoucriere expressed UNICEF’s strong commitment to support the federal and state governments to drive birth registration throughout Nigeria, so that no child is left behind.

“E-birth registration is a formidable opportunity and innovative opportunity and it is a game changer. It helps to have a faster, more reliable, more efficient birth registration process. It also do away with the issues of distances, geographical distances that often prevent parents from registering their children.

“Besides, from both birth registration, it is also a great opportunity to have a reliable civil registration system for Nigeria that generates necessary data to have an effective planning and policy implementation that impacts positively on the lives of all children in Nigeria.

“It is to ensure that every child in Nigeria is given the right to a legal identity. A registered child has acknowledged rights to protection and also to healthcare, education and other critical services. It is very important without child registration, those children remain invisible to our governments, making it, of course, a very big challenge to plan adequately for the children’s rights,” Lafoucriere said.

In his presentation, the UNICEF Child Protection Specialist, Denis Onoise disclosed that the Fund is targeting 9,362,399 under-five, and 4,626, 417 under-one children for the digitised-birth registration by the end of 2024.

He added that the Fund is also targeting a total of 928,523 under-five children for e-birth registration in the Southwest states of Oyo State, 304,058; Osun State, 151,317; Ekiti State, 133,276; Ogun State 172,516 and Edo State, 167,356 to commence this July.

Quoting Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2021, UNICEF said only 57 percent of Nigerian children under five years of age had their birthday registered, while 43 percent were not captured.

According to him, as part of UNICEF work plan for 2024, “there is a call to action to achieve SDG 16.9, integration of eCRVS within the strategic vision of the health sector in Nigeria (2023-2026) as well as legal and policy requirement for Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare to transmit/report all documented cases of births and deaths to NPC”.

The transformative potential of e-birth registration according to UNICEF, is a formidable opportunity to get more children registered and have a legal identity.

“It makes it easier for parents to register their children as soon as they are born. It’s an innovative approach that will make the birth registration processes more accessible and efficient.

“Besides birth registration, it also create a very robust and reliable civil registration system that not only recalls birth but also generates vital statistics that are necessary for effective planning, policy implementation and budgeting.

“Accurate and timely data from birth registrations also allows us to monitor the progress that we are collectively making across several sustainable development goals”.

The Lagos State Director of National Population Commission (NPC), Bamidele Sadiku, who presented a paper on “Protocol For CRVS-NIN Enrollment/Testing Integration” said the purpose of the process was to establish a standardised procedure for integrating the National Population
Commission’s Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system with the National Identity Management Commission’s (NIMC) enrollment process.

“To ensure efficient, accurate, and secure data collection, storage, management and sharing between the two systems. This protocol applies to all individuals registering for CRVS services (birth, still-birth, adoptions, death, marriage, divorce, and migration) and NIMC enrollment (National Identification Number issuance)”.