Why register births, marriages, and deaths? Nadya Kassam, formerly with the United Nations Children’s Fund, provides the answers in this interview. She discusses how the system can help government strategically plan for health and educational purposes. Importantly, the system also provides citizens with legal proof of identity.
-----------
The importance of registering births, marriages and deaths: Nadya Kassam
(Screen displays text: “Centre of Excellence for CRVS Systems/Le Centre d’excellence sur les systèmes ESEC – Expert Talks: Understanding civil registration and vital statistics systems.” Slide transitions to new screen with the title: “The importance of registering births, marriages and deaths: Nadya Kassam.” Ms Kassam appears on screen with the title: “Nadya Kassam, formerly with the United Nations Children’s Fund.”)
Birth registration is the first proof that that child exits. It’s your first legal identity. When a child is born, it becomes registered and receives a birth certificate. That’s the first legal document.
Why is this important? If you don’t know how many numbers of children are born, you don’t know how to plan for their health, their education in the future. For example, knowing the number of babies that exist in your country, as a government, helps to plan vaccination campaigns, or how many schools to build, or how many teachers to train.
Quite often, you’re going to need your birth certificate in order to get a passport, get a driver’s license. It’s that first document that proves that you exist, and then you can access other things. Sometimes you need a birth certificate or form of ID to open a bank account.
Death registration, which is another very important statistic, and cause of death, and marriage registration. Those kinds of pieces of information about a person are really important. For example, if you’re a child and your parents die, you might need to claim some kind of inheritance.
We found some years ago, when HIV/AIDS was really taking a grip and killing large numbers of adults in sub-Saharan Africa, that children needed to prove who they were and who their parents were in order to inherit the land or the home that they lived in. It was that legal identity that they had for themselves, plus the registration or the certificates of marriage and death that helped them claim their inheritance.
(Image is replaced with the following text: “This interview was recorded in Ottawa, Canada in July 2016. Funded by Global Affairs Canada and the International Development Research Centre, the Centre of Excellence for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems contributes directly to the work of the Global Financing Facility.” Logos for the following organizations appear at the bottom of the screen: Global Affairs Canada/Affaires mondiales Canada, IDRC/CRDI, Government of Canada, along with We support Global Financing Facility.)
Disponible en français: [ Ссылка ]
