The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has said that more than 50% of the births of children under five remain unregistered in Nigeria.
The organisation in a statement to mark the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Day said Nigeria alone accounts for 11 per cent of unregistered children in West Africa.
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The statement said the country is still addressing structural, normative and operational challenges to birth registration.
Birth registration is a one-off event that gives every child a unique identity which will give them better access to vital services like health, education, and social protection.
Peter Hawkins, UNICEF Nigeria Country Representative said , “Every child counts – and we must ensure that we count every child, so that they can best benefit from important services like health and education.”
He said there is need to work together to ensure effective coordination to make this happen.
“Functional systems that allow for the sharing of data across information management databases that are integrated with other vital services are necessary to push the birth registration rate in Nigeria up, and make sure every child is counted,” he said.
Hawkins said every child has a right to a name, a nationality and a legal identity, adding that “Working together, we can and must bring Nigeria to meeting its SDG obligation to provide a legal identify for all, including through birth registration.”
The statement said the National Population Council (NPC) has identified information and communication technology assets to support effective CRVS systems that are integrated with other governmental systems, such as health and identity management.
This will ensure the highest standards of data protection and confidentiality of personal data to promote birth registration among civil registration, health, and identity management systems.
SDG Target 16.9 calls for governments, by 2030, to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration. The indicator for the target is the “proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age.”
Globally, the births of 166 million children under 5 have never been recorded.
According to UNICEF, Children on the African continent have the lowest birth registration rate in the world, with only 44 per cent of children registered at birth and millions of deaths also go uncounted each year.
