WUNRN
SENEGAL - MOBILE PHONE TEXT
MESSAGING FOR BIRTH REGISTRATIONS
Mobile phone application for birth registration in Kolda, a
remote region in the South of Senegal with low birth registration rate. Photo: Maxime
Le Hégarat/IRIN
KOLDA, 9 August 2012 (IRIN) -
Only a handful of births are registered in the remote Kolda region of southern
Senegal, but a new mobile phone application that allows parents to text the
details of a newborn to obtain a birth certificate could cut down school
drop-outs when the children are older.
Senegalese law does not make birth declaration mandatory, yet birth
certificates are required for enrolling a child in school and registering to write
exams. The remoteness of some villages from civil registration centres,
combined with poverty, ignorance, and even negligence, have hampered birth
registration.
After Swiss NGO Aide et Action introduced the texting
system, parents participating in the pilot phase of the programme
registered 20 births in three months from September 2011. The highest birth registration
before then was in 2003, when only 12 births were declared.
“A villager working in the fields often doesn’t have money even to organize for
baptism. He names his child and returns to the farm - he doesn’t worry about
the future,” said Yaya Kandé, the deputy village chief in charge of birth
registration.
Village chiefs in Kolda have been provided with mobile phones loaded with the
birth registration application. Parents unable to afford the cost of travelling
to a registration centre can now give the information about the newborn to the
chief, who sends it to a government registrar in a text message. Birth
certificates cost 300 CFA francs (about 60 US cents) and sending the text costs
just 10 francs.
“This method ensures security of information, as it uses a coding system. The
data is centralized and stored in a server, and the authorities can easily
follow it up,” said Aide et Action spokeswoman Agnès Pfister.
Abdoulaye Baldé, a civil servant and local registrar, said the system “reduces the
distance, time and money. A village elder living 20 kilometres away can send
the details of a baby within the same week he or she is born. For the parents
who cannot leave their farms, it also solves the problem of travelling.”
Yaya Kandé (right) deputy village chief
in Kolda region, texting details of new born for registration |
The high cost of registering a birth was the most powerful
deterrent to parents who did not do so in 20 countries studied, says the UN
Children's Fund (UNICEF). Sub-Saharan
“There has been a change. Many births are now being registered. In past two
months [May and June 2012], 80 percent of the births have been declared,” said
Aliou Camara, another civil registration official.
“I declared the birth of my baby by phone because it is very simple,” said Sene
Sally, a mother of four in Kolda.
The region is
“Many pupils go to school for six years, but quit just when they are about to
sit the sixth-grade exams because they don’t have birth certificates,” said
Oumar Baldé, who is in charge of the mobile registration programme in Kolda.
“Sixty percent of births in Kolda are not registered.”
Village chiefs are usually provided with a register to record births and later
transmit the details to government registrars, but the ledgers are rarely
replaced when they are full, and parents then have to pay about $12 to declare
the birth of a child at the magistrate’s court when he or she is one year old.
“Logically, the parents don’t see the need to come back and register the births
of other children,” said Mohammed Salla, the deputy head of the UNICEF in
School teacher Ousmane Coly said few of the pupils in his school’s nursery and
pre-school class have birth certificates. “It’s a difficult task for us. They
come without certificates when they start nursery school, which means they
can’t sit sixth grade exams. We negotiate with the inspectors while the parents
try to obtain the papers,” said Coly.
“Often parents think that vaccination cards can be used instead… In our school,
only 50 out of 172 children in the nursery to pre-school classes have birth
certificates.”
Technical experts are studying the programme while the authorities are working
to make the texting system a legally recognized method of birth registration,
Pfister told IRIN. A second phase of the project is underway and will target
500 villages in Kolda and Diourbel in southern and central