40 million registered through Plan's Universal Birth Registration campaign

After a five year long Universal Birth Registration (UBR) campaign, more than 40 million people across 32 countries, most of them children, have been ‘found’ and registered.

Plan's new Count Every Child report examines the impact of non-registration for children and highlights the successes and learnings achieved throughout the campaign.

Being unregistered denies children access to many of their rights such as education, health, and participation as active citizens in their country.

As a result of the campaign millions more children today and in the future can:    

• Get access to life-saving medicine and health care, schooling, finance, voting and legal aid.
• Be protected from becoming victims of various forms of sexual exploitation and abuse from human trafficking and the sex industry. 
• Be guarded from illegal and extremely dangerous child labour and co-erced lives as child brides and press-ganged child soldiers

Universal birth registration is impossible to ignore and entirely possible to achieve.

If countries have the political will to make it happen, Plan will pledge to help make it a reality.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

In his foreword to the report, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu remembers when the campaign started:

'When I helped Plan to launch a global campaign on universal birth registration in 2005, it was clear that a mammoth task lay ahead of us. At that time, some of the statistics were appalling – in some areas of the world more than 90 per cent of children remained unregistered.

'It has been a real pleasure to be associated with this campaign... one that found Plan responding with grassroots programmes that have been both practical and innovative. In fact, many of the pilot projects and methodologies devised by Plan have been picked up and used in other settings to improve registration.'

The five year campaign also helped to improve laws in 10 countries – enabling access to registration for an additional estimated 153 million people and ensuring birth certificates for generations to come, the report reveals.

For example, in Cambodia around 7 million people (around 56 per cent of the population) picked up their birth certificates in only 10 months. Also, one area of Indonesia saw registration rates soar from only 3 per cent to 72 per cent in two years.

Plan International Australia CEO, Ian Wishart, stresses that, ‘A child always has an identity with their family but the official recognition of a child by the State takes the form of a birth certificate. Without this formal recognition, children can be vulnerable, disenfranchised and stateless.’

The Universal Birth Registration (UBR) campaign has given official recognition to many remote and marginalised groups – from 20,000 street children in Dhaka, Bangladesh to the Baka people of Cameroon who had never previously been officially registered. The report also reveals some remarkable stories of determination, including a woman from the Dominican Republic who walked 120km just to register her child.

Plan says that work to improve systems must continue and is urging global organisations to make UBR a reality. It wants national governments to make registration free and accessible and to register children as soon after birth as possible.

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Editors Notes

Visit plan-international.org/birthregistration for further information.

For a sound bite of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, general vision or images contact:

Megan Brown - Brand and Communications Manager
Plan International Australia
0411 035 388