A Ticket to Citizenship
In December 2000, Plan International, UNICEF, Civil Registrars and the NGO Committee on UNICEF held a workshop in Surabaya, Indonesia to look at practices that promote, increase and improve birth registration.
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| Adam Hinton |
 | This workshop was undertaken as part of the Unregistered Children Project (UCP). Participants, including representatives from Plan, other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), UNICEF, and Civil Registrars Offices came from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uruguay and Vietnam.
The primary objective of the workshop were to:
- Learn about the birth registration activities being carried out by Plan, Civil Registrars and UNICEF in six Asian countries and to select best birth registration improvements practices,
- Strengthen collaboration in the Asian community of actors committed to improving birth registration practices,
- Contribute to learning about capacity building in and policy formulation of birth registration improvement practices in Asia,
- Contribute to development of birth registration improvement practices in other parts of the world.
In order to advance birth registration, participants at the conference found that multi-pronged strategies were necessary, such as:
- Creation of more effective government laws and structures to register births such as mobile registration, registration at the place of birth or late registration at the place of domicile,
- Enhancement of the technical capacity of government officials and other relevant parties to undertake birth registration,
- Grassroots networking and local level initiatives in order to bring the issue of registration as close to the community as possible,
- Incorporation of birth registration activities across programmes,
- Awareness raising in order to increase the demand for registration and the overall knowledge of children's rights among government officials, community leaders, parents and children.
While aware of the profound difficulties facing many countries in trying to realise the right of every child to be registered at birth, nevertheless advances have been made in the past few years.
"A ticket for Citizenship" was published in June 2001 highlighting the outcome of the workshop and some of the advances made for universal birth registration.
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