Invisible, ignored and vulnerable

Lin sighed and shook her head. No, none of her four children – Tivin, 7, Tivan, 6, Jivi, 4, or the baby, Siva, at a year and a half – were registered. And he couldn’t do the paperwork because he had lost his identity card.

Without that essential role, the people of Cambodia have no rights. They cannot go to school, get state medical aid, vote, rent an apartment, open a bank account, or get a passport.

They’re under the radar screen and they don’t count. As far as the government is concerned, they do not exist, other than to be detained and abandoned in the country from time to time.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lin and her children – her husband, Tran, died – live under a tree on 108th Street in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. There they barely make a living from the money tourists give Lin for the baby. Older children steal what they can from the garbage and market stalls in the area.

Without being registered, the children are far behind the eight ball.

The statistics on being invisible

While 95.6 percent of babies in England and Wales are registered, the number drops to 10 percent in Bangladesh and plummets to three percent in Somalia and Liberia.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child declared that birth registration is a fundamental right. Governments need to know how many births and deaths there are each year, but in the developing world it is still a problem.

Why don’t parents register their children? The reasons vary, but many times it is due to ignorance or lack of access to resources. Consequently, a child born in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be one of the 20 million who is not registered. In Southeast Asia, the number is estimated at 24 million. If these areas are combined, one in three children is not registered.

Unregistered children come from situations of poverty and may end up being trafficked or forced into manual labor and paid very little. Children as young as 10 or 11 end up working as servants to get enough to eat.

What can be done

The first step is that governments must change the policy to register all children in the law. While this is a starting point, it should be followed by action. The child registration process should be simplified as much as possible.

Officials must go to rural areas, particularly in Africa and Asia, both to register children and to educate their parents on the importance of having a birth certificate.

Half-time attempts have been unsuccessful and the problem of under-registration continues to grow. Everyone needs to get involved to address the problem.