Every birth should be registered by 2024

The resolution was reached as ministers, senior government officials and development partners in civil registration, health, justice, planning and statistics sectors gathered at the gathering to discuss these and other related issues, at the first-ever Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) in the region. 

The consensus would mark a major turning point in Myanmar, where around 1.6 million children, or three out of ten aged under five years, remain unregistered.

The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) estimated that 135 million children under the age of five in Asia and the Pacific have not had their births registered. 

In this scenario, when a baby girl is born but her birth is not recorded, if she dies soon after, her death is not likely to be recorded either.

If she survives, she is at greater risk of being put to work as a child labourer, married off as a child bride or being trafficked against her will.

With this region home to most of the world's unregistered births, the conference in Bangkok urged more urgent action to register and record all the vital events of their citizens, including births, deaths, marriages and adoptions.

"To ensure that we leave no one behind, we have to make sure that we count everybody first," the United Nations Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, Ahmad Alhendawi, said at press conference on November 27. 

In Myanmar, the universal coverage for birth certificates of the nation stays at 72 per cent, with rates as low as 24 per cent in Chin State.

While most children in Yangon are registered, 76 per cent of children in Chin State, 43 per cent of children in Magway, 41 per cent of children in Rakhine State and 11 per cent of children in Mon State do not possess a birth certificate. Children who are less likely to be registered include children of migrants and children who do not live with their parents.

In October, the first-ever Birth Registration Week was kicked off in the country to start comprehensive registration process, to ensure that all children born in the country are entitled to the same basic public services.

In 2012 and last year, the UNHCR conducted a study with the Indonesian and Philippine governments, and identified more than 6,000 people of Indonesian descent with undetermined nationality in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The two governments have since agreed to work together to verify their nationality.

In the region, though, the largest stateless populations so far identified are located in Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia, according to a UNHCR report last year.

The Asia-Pacific region has some of the best and worst civil registration systems in the world. For instance, almost one in three unregistered children in the world live in India.

While the registration of births in the region varies from 24 per cent to 100 per cent, the registration of deaths can differ by as much as 9 per cent to 100 per cent. Death registration tends to be lower as the incentives for doing so are fewer.

In 2012, 47 Asia-Pacific countries and territories including China, South Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines completed self-assessments.

Thirty-six of them reported their own systems lacking, while eight countries found their systems dysfunctional.

A Unicef report last year found that while the birth of male and female children tended to be registered at the same rate, urban households were more likely to register births.

Ethnicity was also a differentiating factor.

Birth registration for ethnic minorities tends to be lower than average in countries like Vietnam.

Without regularly collected statistics, countries have no adequate way of monitoring maternal and infant mortality or per capita indicators.

The lack of birth registration is a key cause of statelessness, points out Nicholas Oakeshott, the regional protection officer from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"They are left without any legal identity or any documents to show that they have a link to a state and are entitled to nationality under the law," he told The Straits Times. As a result, they usually cannot hold passports or own land or vehicles.