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H - Birth Registration
Defining Birth Registration
Birth registration is the official recording of the birth of a child by a state administrative process. It is the permanent and official record of a child’s existence and is fundamental to the realization of children’s rights and practical needs.
FACTS AND FIGURES
-Around 50 million births go unregistered every year in developing countries.
- In sub- Saharan Africa, 55 per cent of all births go unrecorded every year.
- South Asia has the largest number of unregistered children: no records exist of the birth of six out of every ten babies born annually.
- Approximately 24 million births were not registered in 2005 in South Asia. |
These unregistered children are almost always from poor, marginalized or displaced families or from countries where systems of registration are not in place or functional.
Sometimes there may be a deliberate lack of birth registration, with particular groups excluded. Discriminatory policies intended to minimize the official size of ethnic minorities directly affect the provision of assistance to immigrants.
Most countries have a legal provision for registering births of children within a prescribed period. However, often these laws are not comprehensive enough, are not enforced or do not function. There are also practical problems, including births which take place in isolated rural locations, or births away from medical facilities, which are the places where birth registration normally takes place.
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