Executive Summary
Birth registration is essential to a child’s place in the world and his or her access to legal, political, social, health, educational and other rights. Globally, only 65% of children under the age of five have had their births registered. A total of 500 million children have no official identification. Without a birth certificate, it can be much harder for a child to enroll in school or access health care services. It also makes a child much more vulnerable to child marriage, child labor, trafficking, and detention.
The problem is even more acute in the emergency context after natural disasters and conflicts. In these settings, birth registration services may be stalled, individual birth certificates lost or even entire archives destroyed. The risks for the child are high here. A refugee without a birth certificate is even at risk of becoming stateless and the risk for child trafficking is magnified in this environment.
Plan International’s community birth registration campaigns and accompanying efforts to support national civil registration systems will focus on substantially raising birth registration rates in communities with high numbers of currently unregistered births. Further, using innovative approaches, we’ll bring registration drives to children living in humanitarian settings.
With prior birth registration campaigns, Plan has helped register the births of more than 40 million people in 32 countries and helped influence laws in 10 countries that have made 153 million more children eligible for free birth certificates. More than 90% of children who are supported by Plan International's child sponsorship programming have their births registered.
Charity, fund, non-governmental organization, religious institution, school, or other entity
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Accomplishments
With the uncertainty of COVID-19 and the scope of this global pandemic, it is even more urgent and necessary to address the world’s identity crisis. OpenCRVS's greatest success in this time has been our adaptability to provide remote and online program implementation methods, build government capacity, and research, test, and design resilient CRVS systems for protracted crises.
