NAN-F-36
Registration
By Lizzy Okoji
Banjul, May 8, 2017 (NAN) Mr Adama Sawadogo, an Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) expert has called on member countries of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) to adopt electronic birth registration to end statelessness.
Sawadogo made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Banjul.
According to him, in the present world of digital technology, electronic birth registration is more efficient and cost effective for a cohesive national data and to succeed in the fight to end statelessness.
He urged Member States to emulate Burkina Faso’s success of electronic birth registration, through its dynamic digital inventory that captures a child at birth and transfers the bio data immediately to the national data server.
“In Burkina Faso, once a child is born, the child would be given a “bubble bracelet’’ that has a unique barcode that cannot be duplicated.
“The Barcode is scanned with a simple smart phone where a form is generated to be filled with the child’s bio data and immediately sent to the national server.
“The birth certificate would be ready after five minutes and the information can remain in the server for up to two hundred and fifty years.
“Since its inception, registration has been very effective in Burkina Faso and even children born in the rural areas have been registered as it does not cost much to make the equipment available,’’ Sawadogo said.
He said that this had also made the process of reacquiring the birth certificate a lot easier because in case of loss, the certificate could be recovered without going to the birth centre.
Sawadogo said if Member states could key into this innovation, it would go a long way in preventing new cases of statelessness and help in the fight against the menace.
Also speaking to NAN, Ms Mirkka Mattila, Child Protection Specialist with the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) urged the Nigerian government to strengthen the registration of children at birth, especially in rural communities.
She said that the key strategy to achieving a cohesive civil or national registration was to capture every child at birth which was a lot cheaper and easier for any government.
Mattila said that a survey by UNICEF had shown that only 30 per cent of children were registered at birth in Nigeria.
She said that the current crises in the North-East had further impeded the process of birth registration, as a lot of children born to displaced parents had not been adequately registered.
Commending the immunization system in Nigeria, she said that if the same process could be replicated in birth registration, it would make it more effective.
“The level of institutional birth registration is less than 90 per cent but the immunization coverage is often higher than the registration rate.
“We have to ensure that whenever there is contact with a health worker, there is an automatic transmission of the notice of birth for registration.
“We have evidence of this in Nigeria with the programme of the government’s collaboration with UNICEF integrated birth registration services during the maternal and child weeks.
“The percentage went up to 100 per cent with more children being registered during the weeks of the programme than through the normal registration weeks.
“ It is unfortunate but true that many children are not registered at birth and when they come of age or two years older, it is much more difficult to register them,’’ Mattila said.
Mattila said that ensuring birth registration of children automatically gives them a nationality and reduces the risk of children born stateless. (NAN)
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Edited by Ese E. Ekama