Improving Access to Birth Registration for Children in Côte d'Ivoire

Eva Gilliam: It’s Tuesday morning and these children are warming up for a day
of study at a primary school in the heavily populated neighborhood
of Abobo in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Once they pass 5th grade, they
would have to present their birth registration papers. This means
that at least half of them will not be able to present the state exams
and continue their schooling.

These statistics get worse in the North and Northwest of the
country, where UNICEF estimates that between six to nine
children out of ten are unregistered.

Victoirine Coulibaly: They told me to come with my papers, but I didn’t have them.
They told me to bring it the next day otherwise I wouldn’t pass the
exams.

Eva Gilliam: A strict and complicated administrative process means parents
don’t often pull it together to register a child.

Mearit Hirvonen: The problem is that the child has to be registered within the first
three months of his or her life. And normally that’s the father of
the family who should do that. And mothers are waiting for the
father to do it, and many times they just don’t get it done. Then it
means you have to go to the court after three months, and that’s a
very expensive and difficult exercise.

Eva Gilliam: Even if a parent had the time and money for the registration, many
cannot travel the distance required to make the formalities in the
birthplace of the child.

Adama Coulibaly has been the caretaker of his unregistered
nephew, whose father denied paternity at birth.

Adama Coulibaly: They are asking me to go there, to the tribunal in Korogoro, 600
kilometers from Abidjan, to make the request to the judge who will
then give me an appointment, requiring the presence of the two
parents, plus the child.

Eva Gilliam: Children expelled from school are more likely than not forced to
work. This often means technical work as a laborer, mechanic or
seamstress. Yet many children left to their own devices slip off the
grid and slide under the radar.

With the elections coming at the end of November this year,
UNICEF has developed a plan that would work on a strategic
national level to register millions of children.

Maarit Hirvonen: We will try to improve the civil register system, and also and also
strengthen the registering system at the community level, so it’s
more accessible to the population.

Eva Gilliam: UNICEF is preparing for the moment when they can give an
identity to the Ivory Coast one child at the time.

This is Eva Gilliam in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.