11% of children not registered at birth – UNICEF

The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2014 has revealed that 11.3 per cent of births in Guyana are not registered, with hardly any differences between boys and girls.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has stated that this was because of bottlenecks in the system.
UNICEF stated that a qualitative assessment carried out indicated two immediate causes and two underlying causes that influence the low levels of birth registration for some groups and some regions. In terms of immediate causes, UNICEF said, while knowledge of the importance of having the children registered was vital, parents and caregivers have to have the means to register their children.
“Both immediate causes are influenced by the cultural aspects and by the efficiency of the system,” it said, adding that the number of unregistered births was three times higher in Region One (Barima-Waini) than the average for the country. Similarly, a child living in the interior of the country (hinterlands) has twice the chance of not having a birth certificate in comparison to a child living in the urban areas (19 per cent and 9.5 per cent, respectively).
Two other factors that increase the chances of a child not having a birth certificate are poverty and ethnicity.
According to UNICEF, the birth registration is more than an administrative record of the existence of a child and is the foundation for safeguarding many of the child’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
“Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child specifies that every child has the right to be registered at birth without any discrimination. Birth registration is central to ensuring that children are counted and have quality access to basic services such as health, social security and education,” it said, emphasising that knowing the age of a child was central to protecting them from child labour, being arrested and treated as adults in the justice system, forcible conscription in armed forces, child marriage, trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The report said further that there were two bottlenecks within the system that cause low registration: the lack of coordination among the different stakeholders involved in the process of birth registration, and the inefficiency of the registration system.
“The registration system is almost totally manual and highly centralised, resulting in delays due to loss of application and original documents, errors, invalidity of certificates, multiple applications for one child and increased transaction costs,” it said, noting that there was also the deficiency of effective methods to track and accurately assess the status of applications.
It was reported by the Rights of the Child Commission in 2011, that there were cases of unprepared and unskilled staff working on birth registration, resulting in errors in the process.
“For instance, some birth certificates are not being stamped by Government officials, making the document invalid. In the same line, as appointed by the 2014 MICS, gaps in registration could be a result of people reporting partial/incomplete registration as not being registered,” UNICEF added.
It highlighted that until 2015, the partial/incomplete registration would occur when, based on information from the child’s mother, the father of the child was expected to present himself to affix his signature to the form acknowledging being the father.
This practice has changed and it is expected that the number of partial/incomplete registrations will be reduced in the coming years, UNICEF said, underscoring that birth registration forms pending fathers’ signatures are going to be processed and birth certificates will be issued by the General Register Office (GRO) after a specific length of time has elapsed. The process allows for the name of the child’s father to be added to the birth certificate at a later stage.