Mr. Iddris Abadallah, Child Protection Officer at UNICEF in Accra has urged government to scrap late birth registration fee for new born babies in the country.
He said families with scarce resources were often deterred by such fees resulting to nearly half of the country’s children being unregistered.
Mr. Abdallah was speaking at the Fourth National Births Registry Day celebration on the theme, "Universal Births and Deaths Registration-Key to achieving Ghana’s Millennium Development Goals," at Kpetoe in the Adaklu-Anyigbe District in the Volta Region.
He said Ghana was the first country to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at the First World Summit on Children in 1990.
Mr. Abdallah said despite this, many Ghanaian children did not enjoy the right to national identity simply because their parents failed to register them within the first twelve months after delivery.
He observed that birth registration rate continued to decline from 67 per cent in 2005 to 54 per cent in 2006 after successive years of increased birth registration in the country.
Mr. Abdallah said children born in rural areas were less likely to be registered than their counterparts in the urban communities adding that lack of birth registration exacerbated their poverty and underscored their marginalisation.
He advocated free registration of all children under the age of five within a defined registration period so that unregistered children in the country could be registered.
Mrs. Joyce Odame, Rights of the Child Coordinator of Plan Ghana, a child-centred community development organization, proposed that parents should allowed to register their unregistered children between the ages of 0-18 years free of charge as part of Ghana’s Golden Jubilee.
She said this would enable the country to mob its backlog of unregistered children and facilitate the issuing of national identification cards.
