Birth certificates (again)
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 24/May/2011 17:01, 34 days ago
In between chasing chickens, sewing quilts and hauling water I have actually been quite busy working recently. I’ve been collaborating with the local council to try and get a new system for registering birth certificates up and running across the arrondissement of Maga.I’ve already written aboutbirth certificates, but I’ll repeat that the lack of them is one of the biggest problems for keeping children in school. Without a birth certificate children cannot do their exams at the end of primary school or go on to secondary school. At least three quarters of children do not have a birth certificate. However brightthey are, and however committed their parents have become to continuing their education, they are blocked from doing so. The only options available when a child is already at school are to get in touch with someone who sells unauthentic birth certificates for about 5000 CFA (£7), or to go through along legal process which can cost up to 35,000 CFA (£45).If babies are registered at birth it’s free, but baby either has to been born at a health centre or declared by their parents at a registration centre within a month of their birth to get their birth certificate. For the parents living in the bigger villages where the registration centres and the health centres are located this is feasible (although many are put of by the 2500 CFA hospital fee). In the smaller villages in the bush the only time a woman will give birth in a health centre is if there are serious complications, and almost no babies ever get registered.In the new strategy we’ve been implementing, based on a very successful project at Zina, just north of Maga, and adapted in collaboration with chiefs, councillors, and the people who run the registration centres, babies will be registered in their homes. After a training village chieftains have selected a community secretary, who will go round to the parents of newborns and write the details needed for the birth certificate in a notebook, witnessed by the religious or traditional leaders in the village. The community secretary, who will be paid 400 CFA for each birth he registers, will then take the notebook withdetails of all the births in his village to the registration centre, where the birth certificates will be filled out. We’ve trained hundreds of chieftains, secretaries, Imams, Pasteurs, and leaders of women’s associations, and the reaction has been very positive.The project’s success now depends on local actors doing the minimal amount of work that is required of them. This can be a challenge: the local council was barely capable of buying the hundred notebooks required to write down the details of births (not because they didn’t have the money, but because no-onewas willing to take responsibility to go out and buy notebooks). The employee responsible for birth certificates at the council is claiming that it is not his job to photocopy the necessary paperwork (of course it is). One chieftain at Pouss tried to claim travel money at our training session for himself and five friends (who had not been at the meeting), by writing all their names down on the list and signing for all of them himself (we spotted this). There have been no registers in some registration centres for three years, becauseno-one had bothered to tell the councilthat the registers had run out.On the other hand, there are some people who are deeply committed to making sure the project works out. I met one chieftain who was travelling to the registration centre and all the way to see the Sous-Prefet if necessary, to make an official complaint against parents refusing to register their children. The mayor, when reminded that there were no registers in three out of four registration centres, bought over a hundred new registers the next day. The head of the registration centre at Guirvidig is working hard to make sure that the process works there, and so far it is. Last year less than 160 children were registered at Guirvidig. In the past six weeks he’s already registered more than 200.Also, if this blog post ever makes it online it is a miracle, because there's a rainstorm outside and the electricity is dying.