In Cameroon, children left with no nationality

Chantal Waimene has big plans for her five children. At least one of them, she says, will become an influential politician. With savings from the sale of her cotton crop, she thrives to give them the best education.

But there is major flaw in her calculation.

It is not her poverty, neither the slow breakdown of the cluster of tiny huts she calls home nor the fact that she herself never went to school. It is not even the fact that climate change has reduced the harvest, taking a bite at her income.

None of the five children has a birth certificate.

Low birth registration in Cameroon

Without the “membership card of society”, they lack an official identity and nationality, according to child protection organisations. Unregistered children often run the risk of being shut out of society, according to the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF); and any chance they have of progressing in life is compromised.

About a million young Cameroonians are in that situation. According to the most recent government estimate, more than a third of Cameroonian youngsters do not have birth certificates. In the Far North, where the problem is worse, the percentage is more than 60. The birth certificate is the only means of claiming nationality by birth in Cameroon.

“A child without a birth certificate simply does not exists,” says Albert Bouba, a school head teacher in Maroua, who says nearly a tenth of his pupils have no official record of their existence.

“A child without a birth certificate simply does not exists” Albert Bouba, a school head teacher in Maroua, on the implications of non registration of children.

Illiteracy is often blamed for the high number of children without birth certificates in Cameroon. Children are born at home, a whooping 40%, and parents never take the next step of listing them in the register of births. But often, it is a mixture of poverty and plain ignorance, says child protection experts.

Most of the excuses parents give for not registering their children are unfounded, says Amadou Assana, head of civil registry at the Maroua First District Council. The law, he says, allows for children born even at home to be registered. “Anyone who witnesses the birth of a child can go to a council and declare the birth for free with 60 days,” says Assana. It is 30 days for children born in a health facility.

Cameroon has more than 3.6 million children under the age of five. About 820,000 children were born in 2012, the year with the most recent estimates, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Without registration, children are more exposed to sexual abuses, forced labour and other violations of their rights, says UNICEF.

UNICEF has recently launched a grassroots communication project in the Far North to promote essential family practices, among them, the registration of births as a means to protect children. It uses community relay workers to educated parents on the benefits of child registration, and the threat non action poses to dreams like those Waimene has for her children.