Over 10,000 children in CMR have no birth cert

Cameroon’s economic capital alone has over 10,000 legally non-existent children. These are children aged thirteen years and above who have no birth certificates or any other identification documents.

According to a study commissioned by Rotary International “these are children who exist, but legally have no real existence”. This phenomenon does not only exist in the economic capital but throughout the country.

A recent investigation carried out in the Far North Region of Cameroon by a non-governmental organisation known as Association of Competences for a Better Life (ACBF) found that more than 50% of children born in that part of Cameroon have no legal existence.

A spokesperson of the association told Cameroon Concord that the NGO had to undertake humanitarian action in favour of low-income families in the Far North Region and discovered that most families in the Region don’t bother to obtain birth certificates for their children after birth. “The phenomenon of children without a legal existence is nationwide.

Parents are only forced into giving a legal existence to their children when they go to register them in school and are asked for a birth certificate. The problem in the three northern regions is accentuated because of the low percentage of school attendance in these regions”, an ACBF source revealed.

Poverty and the complicated procedure involved in acquiring a birth certificate turn off parents who would otherwise want a legal existence for their children. “To be able to get a birth certificate one has to first declare the age of the child in court and even after acquiring the age declaration, bribery and corruption in the civil status registries makes the price of a birth certificate beyond the reach of so many ordinary Cameroonian families.

The whole process of acquiring a birth certificate costs above 10,000 FCFA (US$20). What incentive has a family living on less than a dollar a day to cough out US$20 just to acquire a birth certificate for a child it cannot feed?”, asks legal practitioner Oben Joseph.

The situation in urban centres like Douala is caused by other reasons different from ignorance and poverty. Most of the children without birth certificates in Douala are orphans born of parents who died of HIV-AIDS.

The Regional Delegation of Social Affairs for Littoral says besides the orphans, there are also children born of adultery and whose mothers are adolescents who did not want the pregnancies in the first place.

Sociologist Um Mbock attributes the high rate of criminality in urban centres to some of these children without a legal existence who have been abandoned to themselves and who live in the streets because they have no homes.

“Unable to go to school or being employed because they have no legal identity, most of these children resort to crime and drugs. The path to a better future for any child is through a legal existence”, the sociologist says.

He estimates that over two million children in Cameroon today have no legal existence and that means that they are not going to school and constitute a non-negligible pool from which criminal gangs harvest their accomplices and future gang leaders.

“To curb a future exponential proliferation in criminality, it would be advisable for government to immediately undertake a drive to identify most of the street children in our urban areas and give them a legal existence. This drive should also be extended to the rural areas where most parents are always not in a hurry to make birth certificates for their children because of the costs involved”, Um Mbock advises.

That over two million children in Cameroon have no legal existence means that the population figures of the country cannot be a genuine approximation of the national population.“How can a country plan development and the provision of social amenities when it does not know the number of people for which the amenities are intended?”, the Sociologist asks.