Birth registration: Lagos success story, lessons for others

SAM NZEH in this report examined how Lagos state achieved 94% in birth registration, according to the MICS report 6, and lessons that other states can imbibe and implement to achieve the same result.

Birth registration, the official recording of a child’s birth by a government agency is one of the most important events in a child’s life. It establishes the existence of the child under law and provides the foundation for ensuring many of the child’s rights. Although birth registration alone does not guarantee that a child will have access to adequate healthcare, receive an education, or be free from abuse or exploitation, its absence leaves a child at a significantly greater risk of a range of human rights violations.

Despite the importance of birth registration approximately 50 million new born babies are not registered each year, accounting for over 40percent of the children born annually.

Not only that these children do not exist in the eyes of the law, they are starting life against the run of play. When planning is made for the population, they are not considered. In legal terms, they are invincible, and hence the possibility of being deprived of the basic necessities of life is high. This is not the life they choose, but it is their reality.

One of such children is a six-year-old Lagos-born Laraba Shehu who is too thin for her age. Her mother had sought to enroll her in one of the primary schools in Agege Local Government Area, but she was rejected. The head teacher said she must be around four-years-old hence could not be admitted into the school.

Shehu’s mother’s explanation about her real age fell on deaf ears because she could not provide her birth certificate; nothing to show the ‘little girl’ has grown enough to withstand the rigours of primary one study.

Little Shehu was returned back home with disappointment in the eyes of his mother. She lost the supposed year she was to start school. With the lack of birth certificate, the little girl got punished for what she knew nothing about. Her parents, or perhaps the government didn’t offer her an identity to run with in life.

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Joyce Edah, a Lagos girl, in 2016, killed the man who trafficked her to Malaysia for domestic servitude. It was the only way she could be free from the lies, sexual oppression and the repeated abuse she was subjected to.

But the government of the country would hear none of that. She was prosecuted and they handed a death penalty. Her legal defence claimed she had been a minor at the time of her abuser’s death, which would have kept her from the gallows.

But her passport had been deliberately falsified by the traffickers to make her appear older. After all, Joyce looked 18 when she left Nigeria for the unfortunate adventure, but she was 15. The defense sought out her birth certificate which is considered the highest proof of legal identity.

But like the usual case, many Nigerians have no birth certificate. Life almost served her lemons. However, she got lucky. Her defence team uncovered a christening letter that proved she was just a child, which was instrumental to convincing the judges to acquit her. They finally made lemonades from the letter, and she was free.

Joyce was only a certificate away from losing her own life. It is one of the prices people in Nigeria, especially children, pay for not having an identity of their own.

Shehu and Joy are just two among the 17 million Nigerian children who do not have birth registration, representing the second highest globally, just after India which has 71 million unregistered children, according to figures from the global birth registration portal; rapidsms.org.

Despite priding itself as the giant of Africa and the biggest economy on the continent, Nigeria sadly has the highest number of children lost in identity across the continent.

Lagos leads with 94% of birth registration – Report

Meanwhile, Lagos state has topped the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory Abuja on the number of children registered at birth with the Civil Authorities with a total of 94 per cent according to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, MICS, 2021 report released by the National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

Giving an overview of the MICS during a media dialogue in Port Harcourt, UNICEF’s Chief of Monitoring for Result (M4R), Mr Claes Johanson, said although there is a 10 per cent increase in the number of birth registration between 2016 and 2021, there is still an existing gap to be filled.

The survey shows that 3 per cent of children under the age of five had their births registered, but do not have birth certificates.

He also explained that the survey showed that 2 out of every 3 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.

What Lagos state did differently

According to Doyin Odubanjo, chairman, Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria, Lagos Chapter, Lagos State was able to attain the feat through community engagement.

He said: “Engaging religious bodies to encourage members on the need to register their children at birth is one of the strategies that help the state, I urge that citizens should embrace registration for easy identification and policy making’’.

He also said the state was priortising interventions to accelerate progress, especially amongst the poor in rural areas and among socially disadvantaged groups.

Relevant changes

Unlike many other states, Lagos said that their recorded success story saw a substantial rise in registration rates over the campaign period. Campaign strategies improved accessibility and shortened distance to registration centres. Survey data show that the registration rate for children younger than 5 years were on the rise.

Lessons learnt

The lessons are that Incorporation of birth registration into community health care, health campaigns and mobile registration activities can reduce the indirect costs of birth registration, especially in poorer communities, and yield substantial increases in registration rates. The link between the health sector and registration activities should be strengthened further and the use of community population registers expanded.

Role of the health system

One campaign strategy has been to tie registration more closely to the provision of health care. For instance, midwives and health workers were instructed to register children during child health campaigns. According to UNICEF, “immunization efforts provide an opportunity for health-care workers to be alerted to the absence of a health card or birth certificate, leading vaccination to be viewed as a potential point of entry to registration for a child”.

Another study suggests that in Lagos “the collaboration between the civil registration office and Health workers, where volunteers and registration officers accompany community health nurses to the maternal and child welfare clinics in the communities to register infants, has the most direct impact on birth registration coverage”.

The fact that registration offices are often located within health facilities or close to them implies a direct connection between health care and registration.

Ways to boost birth registration in Nigeria

According to UNICEF, the way forward is that appropriate funding should consider workforce size, operational costs (such as transportation), infrastructure, monitoring and logistics costs- with the allocation arranged according to an assessment of need, rather than a standard payment to each state office.

Also, expanding birth registration services in local government areas (LGAs) where existing capacity is too low to cover the designated catchment area or population, by expanding birth registration resources (funding personnel procurement of material infrastructure – office spaces and furniture, etcetera) and allocations to LGAs with the highest catchment areas or populations.

Increase registrar’s resources to strengthen collaboration with the health and education sector, including making available birth registration services in all primary health centres and ECD classes is another way to boost birth registration in Nigeria

Also to boost birth registration in Nigeria, National Population Commission (NPC) officials should be provided office spaces within the LGA offices with handheld devices to enable registering children and creating a data bank- but not necessarily issue a birth certificate. The idea is where data of children born are stored in a data bank; retrieval will be easy to enable issuance of certificates.

This report was sponsored by the Solutions Journalism Network and Nigeria Health Watch, (NHW).