Plan Paraguay success: 300,000 people registered and many more to come !

Plan Paraguay has announced the country is on track to reduce the number of unregistered citizens in the country by 75%,  from a high of one million 18 months ago to around 250,000 in by the end of 2012.

A year and a half after launching its The ‘Right to Identity’ programme, it has already helped some 300,000 people get registered and be provided with national identity cards. 

The latest civil registration event in the programme, in partnership with Unicef and Paraguayan government departments, was in General Isidoro Resquín, a town in the San Pedro department of Paraguay.

Over 1,500 people of all ages registered at the event and received their new identity cards. The youngest were six-month-old twins Freddy and Fernando, and the oldest was Doña Gregoria, 87. 

Ensuring sustainability by working with the government

Government departments involved in the programme include the Department of Justice and Work through the Civil Registration, Identification and the Department of Education and Culture;  the National Office of Childhood and Adolescence, and the General Department of Statistics, Surveys and Censuses.

A study by Plan Paraguay found that one of the main factors in preventing an official count of registered births in the country of 6.5 million is that obstetricians do not report births when they occur.