More than 3.5 million children across Southwest Nigeria and Edo State are effectively “invisible” to the law, lacking birth certificates, legal identities, or formal documentation proving they exist.
This was revealed by UNICEF during a strategic Media dialogue in Lagos.
The staggering figure spans Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, and Edo states, pointing to a critical identity gap across both bustling urban centers and remote rural communities.
Speaking at the two-day capacity-building dialogue organized for Journalists, Celine Lafoucriere, Chief of the UNICEF Lagos Field Office, stressed that birth registration is a fundamental human right, not an administrative luxury.
“A birth certificate is not just a piece of paper. It is a child’s ticket into school, what allows a doctor to open an official medical file, and how a family proves a child is theirs,” Lafoucriere said. “Without it, an individual cannot vote, obtain a passport, or inherit property later in life. They go through life constantly having to prove they exist.”
Despite the sharp deficit, public health officials note that the registration procedure itself takes less than five minutes.
Lafoucriere commended the Lagos State Government for leading the region in targeted registration drives for infants under one year old. Through an integrated partnership between the National Population Commission (NPC) and the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), every birth certificate issued now automatically generates a National Identification Number (NIN) at zero cost to families.
However, widespread misconceptions continue to stall progress.
“Many families still do not know that registration is completely free, seamless, and takes less than five minutes,” Lafoucriere noted. “They do not know it can be done at their nearest health clinic or on a digital tablet right in their community, simply because no one has communicated this to them in a language and platform they trust.”
Addressing the systemic barriers, UNICEF Child Protection Specialist Dennis Onoise outlined distance and access,communication gaps,hidden costs as primary bottlenecks restricting universal coverage in Nigeria
To bypass these hurdles, stakeholders are pushing to integrate birth registration directly into routine primary healthcare activities, particularly immunization campaigns.
Under a national Partnership Compact, the NPC, ALGON, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), UNICEF, and technical partner Barnksforte Technologies Limited (BTL) have launched the electronic Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (eCRVS / VitalReg) platform to digitize records nationwide.
Sherif-Deen Kekere-Ekun, State Director of the National Population Commission (NPoPC), confirmed that digital infrastructure is active across centers and expanding rapidly.
“By projection, birth registration coverage stood at 54% as of 2024,” Kekere-Ekun stated. “Through sustained inter-agency collaboration with the Ministries of Education and Health, along with media advocacy, we are scaling operations to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 16.9—achieving total legal identity for all by 2030.”
To ensure accurate, community-level reporting that drives enrollment, UNICEF Communication Officer Blessing Ejiofor emphasized that the media dialogue was specifically curated to build journalists’ capacity across the Southwest. By equipping reporters with a deep understanding of the eCRVS system, media outlets can serve as trusted messengers, dispelling myths and mobilizing parents to register their children without delay.
