Antoinette Nyiraneza had her fourth child, a girl, on Monday night at the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK). Lying in an inclined position on her hospital bed on Tuesday while speaking to The New Times, she looked fatigued after her cesarean delivery but Nyiraneza sounded enthusiastic about the fact that a new law has come to ease birth registration procedures. One of the new changes that make her happy is that after she returns home soon she will not be obliged to walk to the Nyarugenge Sector offices – an hour’s walk from her home – to register her baby. She can do it at the hospital, or her husband can do it for her since the new law allows him to do it without necessarily carrying a marriage certificate or being accompanied by the spouse as was the case before. “In the past, it was stressful to deal with a child’s registration because both parents needed to be available, which was hard for us. But now that we don’t have to be both available, I think it will be easier,” she told The New Times. The amended law was published on February 2, after the government wrapped up the review of the 2016 Law Governing Persons and Family, with clauses on civil registration particularly amended to improve the registration of civil events like births and deaths. Changes included extending civil registration services to places such as health facilities where designated members of staff can legally register events such as births and deaths. Civil registration as defined by the UN is the continuous, permanent, compulsory and universal recording of the occurrence and characteristics of vital events, such as birth and death, of the population in accordance with the law. The World Bank estimates that globally, more than 1.5 billion people lack proof of legal identity. Weak and archaic civil registration systems that fail to achieve key principles of completeness, universality, and accuracy are some of the fundamental challenges that African countries face in their bid to address the legal identity gap on the continent. In the new law, a civil registrar is defined as an officer in charge of civil registration at the level of decentralized administrative entity or a representative of Rwanda in a foreign country. The law, among other things, states that an officer of a health facility has the power of civil registrar to record births and deaths that occur there. It is hoped that early next month, implementation will start after a related ministerial order is also published. Accordingly, an Order of the Minister in charge of civil registration – Minister of Local Government – which is not yet published will specify the officer of the health facility who has that power, his or her responsibilities and the modalities for performance of such responsibilities. Parents such as Nyiraneza, who had trouble with registering new born babies now have 30 days, instead of 15, to register, if not immediately done at the hospital. In addition, a relative or a person present at the child’s birth is also allowed to help register the newborn. On Tuesday, Josephine Mukesha, Director-General of the National Identification Agency, told The New Times that relevant ministerial orders are being finalised ahead of the launch the new registration process. She added: “We have trained the users and are planning to train the cell executive secretaries in the very near future for registration of events occurring in communities.” Two users have been trained in each health facility. “There are more than 550 health facilities including private ones and all were trained; two per health facility,” Mukesha said. Amina Uwase, a civil registrar at CHUK hospital welcomed the legal amendments, saying they are well-timed and have come to ease life for parents and the government. “Some parents missed on registering their children both at the hospital and at their Sectors of residence. Some would skip hospital registration to their sectors, in some cases, some would not register at all,” Uwase explained. She added that once the implementation starts, it will be a better way to ensure that Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) is properly and easily done, on a wider scale. William Muhwava, Chief Demographic and Social Statistics at the Addis Ababa-based African Centre for Statistics of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, said the need to integrate civil registration has become inevitable as Africa responds to the key issues of leaving no one behind and inclusion as expressed in Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want and the UN Agenda 2030, respectively. He said: “CRVS provide disaggregated data by age, sex, geographical location and others that are important for policy-evidence to identify and target supports to groups at risk of being left behind in the development process. “This requires a large amount of data and efforts to harmonize and integrate the diverse data requirements. Vital statistics generated through civil registration processes are essential to fill the gaps in the generation of timely, complete and accurate data for these processes.” Muhwava emphasized that strengthening CRVS systems in Africa is therefore an imperative for the provision of data and statistics that can be used to formulate and monitor the development frameworks. Mukesha said that “CRVS in Rwanda is not a new concept” since registration of civil events dates back to the colonial period. She said: “The CRVS system has always been manual, paper based and in addition to the civil events’ registration system being hosted in various institutions, not providing a one stop service point, it has not been providing timely and complete data on vital events to support informed policy making, implementation and monitoring of development plans.” “Besides being an SDG target on its own, an improved and well-functioning CRVS system is the best source of continuous and up to date information on birth, death and population statistics. These statistics in turn serve as the denominator for a wide range of population-based targets and indicators in the SDGs.” She recalled that one of the key priority areas of intervention in the first phase of the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1) is to ensure that 100 percent of government services are delivered online by 2024 from 40 percent in 2017 and to achieve a zero paper zero trip status in service delivery. This would only be possible with an improved CRVS system, Mukesha stressed. The government undertook to modernize CRVS system to facilitate the registration of vital events to safeguard the rights of all and inform evidence-based decisions, she added. “This has been done by establishing a permanent, continuous, compulsory and universal civil registration and vital statistics system that is modern, complete, capable of providing real time data and which is interoperable with other systems to ensure legal identity for all, good governance and evidence-based decision making for sustainable development and better service delivery.” One billion people, half in Africa, cannot prove who they are According to article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, civil registration establishes the legal identity of an individual. The right to identity is considered such a fundamental human right that it can never be restricted nor be suspended, even in an emergency. In the context of international human rights law, all member states have the obligation to ensure the legal recognition of individuals in their territory. However, Muhwava said, “one billion people in the world today cannot prove who they are and therefore lack legal identity, of which approximately half are in Africa.” He added: “About 650 million of the one billion are children. The adoption of SDG Target 16.9 (legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030) is key to advance the 2030 Agenda commitment to leave no one behind.” Equally relevant, he said, is SDG 17.19 – support to statistical capacity-building in developing countries, monitored by the indicator – proportion of countries that have achieved 100 per cent birth registration and 80 per cent death registration. He said: “If we are to unlock the full potential of Africa’s population, we must take a life-cycle approach to identity starting from birth and ending with death. In many countries, lack of legal identity can lead to denial of even basic services which in turn feeds into a pervasive cycle of poverty and inequality.” “Without legal identity, individuals may not be able to acquire a nationality and become stateless. Women and children may also be forced to resort to participation in the informal labour market, and risk being subjected to extremely poor working conditions, trafficking, sexual exploitation, lack of access to justice, and more.” Other negative effects, he said, include ineligibility – ineligible to receive public services, such as health, education, and social security, or having access to a long list of private services such as banking, internet access, IT and communication.
