Page 359 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS164 Sam N.
To eliminate the possibility of fraudulent birth notification, a number of
countries have stationed civil registration staff within health facilities. In addition
to registering the births occurring in the facility, in some cases the registrar is
able to issue a birth certificate on the spot. Despite the advantages of this
approach it has been only a partial solution, as for cost reasons it has been
limited to the largest maternity hospitals and clinics.
Education campaigns. Providing information to families about the
importance of birth registration, through organized meetings, political or
religious leaders, teachers or others can lead to increased birth registration.
The increase is often limited to the most motivated parents however, and in
any case requires regular repetitions of the campaign.
Mapping the flow of registration documents or information. Business
process mapping is designed to document the flow of paper forms or
information from the source to the final destination at the civil registration
office. Organized as workshops, these activities bring together representatives
of many groups involved in different aspects of birth registration. The
workshops are useful in identifying barriers to document flow and in
encouraging a spirit of cooperation across government organizations. As with
legal reviews, donors are often best placed to organize and fund these
workshops.
Requiring birth certificate for government services. This approach has the
potential to incentivize parents who otherwise would not see the need for birth
registration. This requirement should not be used to deny children access to
education, child support payments or other government services. Instead, civil
registration systems should make birth registration available in connection
with these services, for example establishing temporary registration offices
next to schools at the beginning of the school year.
Facilitating access to birth certificates. Requiring birth certificates for
various services will only be workable if the civil registration system can assure
individuals ready access to their birth certificates. Because birth registration in
many countries has been a paper-based system, the original documents are
generally stored in the civil registration office where the birth was registered.
What this means in practice is that individuals who have moved from their
place of birth are required to return to that location to request a copy of their
birth certificate. In larger countries this could involve long-distance, expensive
travel requiring many days to complete. Even if copies of the original
documents have been forwarded to the central office of the civil registration
system, the fact that carbon paper was used for the duplicates means that
many of the duplicate forms will be blank, the result of inadequate supplies of
carbon paper for local registration offices. Computerization of registration
offices is an obvious solution, but is expensive and may be beyond the
financial resources of many national civil registration systems.

348 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9