An official has stated that the Federal government would digitise the civil registration and vital statistics process and is aiming to register 12.7 million under-five children in 2023.
National Population Commission (NPC) Director of Vital Registration Department Matthew Sunday stated on Friday that the commission expects to register 8.08 million children in 22 priority states and 4.6 million in other states with the digitalisation.
In Lagos, Sunday spoke at the start of a two-day workshop on the operational strategies for digital birth registration in the state, which was organised by the NPC Lagos office in partnership with UNICEF.
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According to him, the percentage of children having birth certificates will rise from the present 33% – 63% in urban areas and 32% in rural ones.
He said;
For us to have a complete registration of children, there must be certification and until one is issued a certificate, that is when we can say one has been registered.
Last week, the NPC and UNICEF announced the roll out of the digitisation process in Kano, targeting the birth registration of one million children in Kano.
Rahama Farah, UNICEF’s Kano Chief of Field Office, said the registration helps to protect children and their rights from birth.
“Most societies first acknowledge a child’s existence and identity through birth registration,” he said.
The FG’s birth registration efforts are now showing progress, with 57% of children under age five registered (about 19.6 million children), compared with only 47 per cent in 2016/17, according to UNICEF. Although national data reveal no gender disparity in these numbers, children are less likely to be registered if they live in rural areas or poor households.
Sunday further noted that only 33% of children in Nigeria actually have birth certificates, adding that birth registration data is critical to planning by any government.
We will go on an aggressive social mobilisation in collaboration with stakeholders, especially the National Orientation Agency (NOA). A greater percentage of our population don’t know there is what we call birth registration.
