African civil registration leaders, ACSA point direction for needed acceleration

There are several countries in sub-Saharan Africa on track to meet the civil and birth registration targets of Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. But the continent as a whole remains well behind the pace needed. ID4Africa convened continental authorities and UN researchers for an online event to explore how the lessons of those furthest ahead in their CRBS work can benefit everyone else.

Episode 60 of ID4Africa’s popular LiveCast series addressed “Civil Registration in Africa: Progress, Policies and Potential.”

Executive Chairman Dr. Joseph Atick began with an update on the upcoming ID4Africa 2025 AGM in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The 2025 AGM will feature double the number of African speakers and segments during the event.

Next, Claudia Cappa and Bhaskar Mishra of UNICEF presented the current state of affairs in global and African civil and birth registration.

As of December, UNICEF 77 percent of children under 5 are registered. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number is 51 percent. Some individual countries like Cote d’Ivoire and Botswana, are above 90 percent, however, while others are still below 25 percent. The countries with lower registration numbers tend to be concentrated in middle and Eastern Africa.

More than half (90 million) of the roughly 150 million unregistered children worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa, Cappa says. Still, the situation has improved significantly from 39 percent registration in 2008.

The progress will have to accelerate dramatically to reach 100 percent by 2030.

Mishra shared six recommendations for improving CRVS systems. UNICEF advises countries to remove discrimination, invest in proven strategies, targeted interventions, community empowerment, comprehensive approach and rebrand CRVS as a foundation for DPI and key public administration tool.

In practice, birth registration is the key to increasing overall child registration. Mishra suggests that the prevailing trend of under-1 year old registration trailing under-5 registration needs to be reversed to improve the overall child registration picture.

UNICEF also calls on governments to streamline registration processes so that a single visit to a registration authority office is sufficient. Mishra notes that indirect costs, such as for court orders in some countries once a birth registration period has elapsed, are also a significant barrier to raising registration rates.

Integrations between health, social protection and education systems and the CRVS system can also provide opportunities for unregistered people to gain legal recognition.

Solving supply-side challenges can help to address demand, Mishra says

Improving the quality of data collected is another step governments can take to help improve their registration systems, Cappa notes.

An ID4Africa LiveCast addressing civil registration progress in 2023 noted that 20 African nations were on pace to meet the SDGs’ universal registration goal, emphasizing that the technical capability for others to join them was already present.

CRVS reforms in 4 countries

Ago Christian Kodia of Cote d’Ivoire reviewed his country’s civil registration reforms and the progress they have delivered. Those reforms include making the birth registration remain as the ID number for the individual, with biometrics added to the ID for service delivery, and launching “community focal points” to extend the system to remote areas. They are also ongoing, with digitization of existing books of birth registrations and digitalization of birth certificate requests and digital ID issuance currently underway as examples.

These reforms and gains have been realized by Cote d’Ivoire despite a set of challenges common to many developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Patricia Mpuya of Tanzania outlined how public-private partnerships (PPPs), decentralization through the local government level, a “1 step, 1 visit process,” digital innovation, including the capture of data through mobile phones, and fee waivers have improved the country’s civil registration rate. These processes increased the number of registration points in Tanzania from 108 to 11,193.

Kenya is also continuing to open more registration service offices, Paul Mwangemi of CRS says, adding 37 since 2023. CRS is targeting 290 offices by 2027, increased from 167 today. The country’s laws are also being reviewed to provide a basis for automated civil registration. Birth registration has reached an estimated 77 percent, as of the 2023-24 year, but death registration is lagging behind, at approximately 45 percent.

An assessment of Sierra Leone’s CRVS and ID landscape in 2014, led by Dr. Atick, led to a legal reform of the country’s system, according to Amb. Mohamed Mubashir Massaquoi. Fully electronic birth registration was launched in 2022, and the digital CRVS and ID management systems are now integrated. He describes a shift from a network of separate systems that talk to each other to a model in which the various systems revolve around the ID system, which talks to each. Along the way, Sierra Leone has gone from approximately 7 percent civil registration a decade ago to 90 percent, with an even higher rate of registration for children under 1 year old.

Karin Heissler of UNICEF noted the importance of national assessments in informing policy changes. The first meeting of CRVS authorities from across Africa was in 2010, she says, and it is only since then that governments have been able to take lessons from civil registration successes elsewhere on the continent.

She called out themes of decentralization, digitalization as a part of the process, rather than a goal in itself from the previous presentations. Another common insight is the need for a comprehensive approach, both in terms of the different bodies within the government, and across the laws, capacity building, technologies and other aspects that combine to create the enabling environment for civil registration.

Action on ACSA

The third portion of the LiveCast explored the ongoing development of the African Civil Registration Shared Asset (ACSA). ACSA was launched at ID4Africa’s 2023 AGM in Nairobi, and its 11-country advisory board was constituted at the 2024 AGM in Cape Town, Josephine Mukesha of Rwanda explained.

ACSA is working on a package of resources for design principles and standards and a CRVS evaluation solution made up of private and open-source tools.

Abdon Marius Mikpon’ai of Benin explained the work carried out at ACSA’s workshop earlier in 2025, including the establishment of the two working committees dedicated to the projects above, and its plans for a ministerial conference in October or November. A meeting will also be held, and a progress update shared, at the ID4Africa AGM in May, and the ACSA board plans to share the outputs of its two projects on GitHub in June, and then multiple countries will be chosen to pilot them.

Those pilots will inform the final versions, which will be shared during the ministerial meeting.

Infant biometrics promise “missing link”

ID4Africa called for the development of infant biometrics in 2019 to address what Atick calls the “missing link” in civil registration. Atick noted the difficulty of capturing useful biometric fingerprint data from infants, and that recent developments appear to have made enrollment possible earlier in life than ever before.

A video presentation from Judge Lidia Maejima of the Court of Justice of Parana, Brazil introduced the emerging legal framework for biometric identification of infants. Her representative Felipe Hay explained how researchers in Brazil developed 5,000 dpi scanners, he says, which accurately record the minutiae of infants’ fingerprints.

The video clearly depicted an Natosafe Infant.ID scanner. The company was not explicitly endorsed or mentioned by name, and competitor Synolo is also participating in Brazilian states’ PoCs.

Brazil waits roughly 24 to 48 hours to capture the biometrics, in order to not burden the new parents with an extra administrative process. The resulting fingerprints have been shown effective for matching months later.

Article Topics

Africa  |  African Civil Registration Shared Asset (ACSA)  |  biometrics  |  civil registration  |  CRVS  |  digital ID  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2025  |  infant biometrics  |  SDG 16.9