WUNRN
TIMOR-LESTE - PROGRESS ON BIRTH
REGISTRATIONS/CERTIFICATES - GIRLS
Photo: Meagan Weymes/IRIN
Thousands of children lack birth certificates
FATULMAU, 25 September 2012
(IRIN) - Filomena Mendonca gave birth to all five of her children at home in
the
With the closest town of
Seventy-eight percent of women in Timor-Leste, a half-island nation of 1.1
million people, do not give birth in a health facility, and according to
official 2010 figures, up to
70 percent of under-five children do not have a birth certificate.
However, things may be changing.
Last year, Mendonca registered all her children, as did a number of other
families in the village. “The village chief came to explain why we should
register our children, and that it’s important for when the children need to
register for school.”
Mendonca’s children are part of a community-run playgroup supported by
international NGO Plan International, where most of the 25 members now have
birth certificates.
In 2011 Plan International and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched a
campaign to achieve universal birth registration in two of the country’s 13
districts, Alieu and Los Palos, working with the government to providing
training at the village level and raising awareness in the community.
Plan International resources mobilization manager Gashaw Dagnew Kebede said
birth registration is vital to provide children with basic, at times
life-saving, services.
“The government has to provide health, education and other social services so
if children are registered with a birth certificate it’s easy to plan for the
future.”
Birth certificates and protection
Birth certificates were also important to protect children in
the courts from being mistreated, especially in cases of sexual abuse, child
labour and trafficking.
“If children are mistreated or abused it’s sometimes very difficult to prove
whether they are really children or adults because they don’t have birth
certificates,” Kebede said.
But despite government and NGO efforts to boost birth registrations in rural
areas, many people still don’t understand their importance.
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Filomena Mendonca and her family |
“We’ve only been an independent country for 10 years and we’ve
been working on child rights for five years, so we still need to bring more
awareness to the community in this area,” National Child Rights Commissioner
Adalgisa Ximenes told IRIN.
Timor-Leste voted for independence in a UN sponsored referendum in 1999
following a protracted bloody separatist struggle with neighbouring
In 2011 a change in the registration process made it possible for people to
register births through the village chief, at a hospital or church. Previously,
people could only register at district offices or in the capital, Dili.
“I hope that as people become more aware, they won’t need NGOs to come to them
to register their children. They will have the awareness to go and register
their children on their own,” said Ximenes.
The government’s national director of birth registration Victor da Costa Neto
said the registration process initially faced problems.
“At that time the number of people registered was very low; we had a lack of
staff and all documents needed to be signed by the national director.”
Considerable progress has been made since then, with an additional 216,000
birth certificates for both children and adults issued in 2011, said Neto,
explaining that everything is done manually as the government does not yet have
a computerized database.
According to the 2011 State of the World's Midwifery report, there
are an estimated 43,000 births per year in Timor-Leste.