Awareness-raising work

Plan is present in the poorest countries that have the most serious birth registration problems. The communities with which Plan works are often unaware of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the responsibility of governments that have ratified the CRC to ensure that every child is registered immediately after birth.

Raising public awareness of birth registration varies from country to country depending on the national and local context. Plan's development approach involves working with children and their communities aiming to ensure methods adopted are relevant and culturally appropriate.

Work has involved, for example:

• reaching out to local communities as in Zimbabwe to overcome their suspicions about birth registration by sharing knowledge about the importance of registering births for effective national planning and providing practical illustrations of situations where proof of age is needed
• promoting birth registration through village development committees in Nepal by initiating discussions about birth registration in women's savings and credit groups as well as in mothers’ groups; a similar approach, targeting existing community structures, was also applied in Ghana and Nicaragua
• working with civil registry staff to initiate discussions on birth registration with community leaders in Indonesia - this led to the establishment of teams of youth volunteers which visit villagers to inform them about the advantages of birth registration and how to go about getting their children registered
• using innovative awareness-raising activities including, organising rallies, puppet shows, street plays, messages displayed on community notice boards and focus group discussions on birth registration such as in India during a birth registration week
• taking advantage of the media to spread awareness, such as in Guinea Bissau where Plan held a workshop for local journalists to build understanding of the issue – this led to the creation of a journalist and press correspondent network on birth registration
• encouraging children’s and young people’s participation – in the Dominican Republic, children helped produce a comic book as part of a birth registration campaign and young people were asked to participate in the filming of a television spot for the campaign.