WHO backs Plan's campaign

A girl proudly displays her birth certificate in rural Cambodia

16 January 2008: The World Health Organisation has thrown its weight behind Plan’s campaign to give every child a birth certificate by launching a drive to encourage all countries to register births and deaths.

Children without birth certificates are less likely to benefit from basic social and political rights, WHO warned. Failure to register children at birth also hampers efforts to collect statistics which are vital for evaluating the success of health programs to improve children’s lives.

WHO’s initiative was launched nearly 3 years after Plan launched a global campaign for universal birth registration that has resulted in millions more children being given an official identity.

Growing campaign

Nadya Kassam, Plan’s head of global advocacy, said: “We are delighted the World Health Organisation has joined the growing campaign to ensure every child benefits from the improved access to health, education and social services that a formal identity brings.

“It is the latest example of the success of Plan’s campaign in convincing policy makers of the importance of birth registration and moving the issue up the global agenda.”

WHO's initiative is being led by the Health Metrics Network, a global partnership established to address the lack of reliable health information in developing countries.

Poor promotion

Dr Margaret Chan, WHO director general admitted United Nations agencies, which include WHO, had not done enough to promote universal birth registration. Despite recent improvements, 48,000,000 of 128,000,000 global births continue to go unregistered each year.

Dr Chan said: “No single UN agency is responsible for ensuring that births and deaths are registered, so it has fallen between the cracks. That is why we have failed to establish, support, and sustain civil registration systems over the past 30 years in the developing world.”

The launch was accompanied by a series of papers in the medical journal The Lancet, entitled ‘Who counts?’, and a toolkit Stepping stones to improving the monitoring of vital events. The Health Metrics Network is now working intensively on the issue with Cambodia, Sierra Leone and Syria.

Learn about Plan’s universal birth registration campaign achievements