- Name
- Proportion of children under 5 whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age
- Indicator purpose
- The purpose of this indicator is to measure the number of children who exercise their right to an identity.
- Abstract
- Registering children at birth is the first step in securing their recognition before the law, safeguarding their rights, and ensuring that any violation of these rights does not go unnoticed. Children without official identification documents may be denied health care or education. Later in life, the lack of such documentation can mean that a child may enter into marriage or the labour market, or be conscripted into the armed forces, before the legal age. In adulthood, birth certificates may be required to obtain social assistance or a job in the formal sector, to buy or prove the right to inherit property, to vote and to obtain a passport.
- Contact organization / person
- Ministry of Human Development
- Unit of measure
- Percentage (%)
- Other characteristics
- Children’s right to a name and nationality is enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) under Article 7. The number of children who have acquired their right to a legal identity is collected mainly through censuses, civil registration systems and household surveys. Civil registration systems that are functioning effectively compile vital statistics that are used to compare the estimated total number of births in a country with the absolute number of registered births during a given period.
- Classification used
- Birth registration: Birth registration is defined as ‘the continuous, permanent and universal recording, within the civil registry, of the occurrence and characteristics of births in accordance with the legal requirements of a country’.
Birth certificate: A birth certificate is a vital record that documents the birth of a child. The term ‘birth certificate’ can refer either to the original document certifying the circumstances of the birth, or to a certified copy or representation of the registration of that birth, depending on the practices of the country issuing the certificate.
Civil authority: Official authorized to register the occurrence of a vital event and to record the required details.
- Disaggregation
- is by sex, age, income, place of residence, geographic location.
- Key statistical concepts
- Number of children under age of five whose births are reported as being registered with the relevant national civil authorities divided by the total number of children under the age of five in the population multiplied by 100.
- Recommended uses
- This indicator helps the Ministry of Human Development to monitor the children who have acquired their right to a legal identity and hence provide them with health care, education, protection, inheritance and a permanent record of existence.
- Other comments
- UNICEF maintains the global database on birth registration that is used for SDG and other official reporting. Before the inclusion of any data point in the database, it is reviewed by technical focal points at UNICEF headquarters to check for consistency and overall data quality. This review is based on a set of objective criteria to ensure that only the most recent and reliable information are included in the databases.
All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.
- Target 2030
- 9. By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration
