NPC, UNICEF partner on automated birth registration - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

The Nigeria Population Commission (NPC) with support from UNICEF, would on Monday, August 10, this year, launch an innovative technology for an automated, digitized system for registering births of children, reports ITREALMS.

This is coming as Nigeria joins the African continent to commemorate Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Day, 2020.

ITREALMS gathered that the technology is a hand-held, customized tablet that registers births using an android application.

“It not only captures and uploads data to a central database/server hosted by NPC in real time, but also captures information about the child, parents and place of birth, education levels of both parents, birth order of the child and the rural/urban base where the child was registered,” sources at UNICEF said.

Also, ITREALMS gathered, the innovation has already been piloted in Kebbi, Adamawa, Bauchi, Sokoto and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, even as it will be deployed in all 774 LGAs in Nigeria.

Birth registration, according to Nigeria’s National Demographic Health Survey 2018 (NDHS 2018), “the continuous, permanent, compulsory, and universal recording of a child’s birth provides legal and documentary evidence to certify a person’s identity. Yet only 43 per cent of children under age 5 have their births registered by the NPC.”

Uj. N. Dominic/Editor