Overview
Current Situation
UNICEF Kosovo had meetings with stakeholder public institutions and authorities to develop a list of challenges that are preventing or hampering the efforts of the public sector to protect the rights of children and serve the needs of young people. Birth registration rate was identified as the biggest challenge that affects children. According to a study by UNICEF Kosovo, approximately 8.3% of households in Kosovo failed to register some of their children under the age of 18.
Registering the birth of a child provides the starting point for the recognition and protection of every child’s fundamental right to identity and existence. Children whose births are unregistered may not be able to claim basic services, such as access to education and health services, and be protected from violence, exploitation and trafficking. In Kosovo there are further factors causing concern: ethnic, regional and gender disparities, and human rights abuses.
project Purpose
The benefits of this project are far reaching; registration for families with unregistered children means their child is better protected and has better access to government services like health and education. It gives them the potential for brighter future full of opportunities.
The Challenge
The Official Public Registrars in Kosovo do not currently have the resources required to collect information about all births at a national level. A method is therefore required that would allow for the easy, quick, and paperless reporting of a childs birth. Presently, no technology-based solutions exist in the area of child registration. There are NGOs who do field work in offering legal aid to families who have not registered their family members but it is paper based and thus identification of families and unregistered persons is slow. Ultimately, the challenge is to bring the registration services to families who may either not be aware of them or are not able to afford them in the form they are currently offered.
SMS has already been used as a means of data collection for birth registration in various places, such as Uganda, Nigeria and Senegal. Furthermore, data collection applications run on smartphones are increasingly being used to collect detailed information and communicate them to a backend system. Given the increasingly successful stories based on the ubiquity of mobile phones for data collection, UNICEF Kosovo has suggested that the problem be tackled as a technology project.
Technology
Currently, the system has been set up and is being tested. It is based on the RapidSMS platform which is connected through an SMS gateway to the SMS Center of a mobile operator (i.e. IPKO) in Kosovo. A testing app allow users to send a free SMS (with household name, number of unregistered children and location) to a particular national shortcode number that was developed in June, 2012.
The system will be designed with the user and beneficiaries at the center of consideration. Therefore, considering the local culture, it has been decided to no include phone numbers of parents, particularly mothers, in the SMS report.
There are however, known limitations to this product. Reporting through SMS requires formatted data and this requires the extensive training of reporters. SMS’s must be 160-characters in length and this limits the amount of information that can be reported. Smart phone applications require even more training in usage and caution in the accuracy of data.
The Process
Key milestones to reach the next gate are:
1. Identify volunteer reporters from different regions in Kosovo
2. Agree with the Civil Registration Agency and an NGO in Kosovo on the information to be reported as well as who can verify the reported information.
3. Ensure the support of a mobile provider to send SMS’s for free.
4. Fully develop the RapidSMS based application.
5. Identify municipal civil status offices who have or need the least support on resources to follow up on received information through SMS.
Volunteers will have the task of identifying unregistered children and are therefore the ones who will make use of the mobile technology. Initially, they will visit families resiging in remote rural areas or in areas populated by minority groups, as these are the most likely to have unregistered children. Once an unregistered child is identified, the volunteed will send a notification via SMS to the civil registration Office. This way volunteers will be able to quickly and accurately identify and alert authorities of an unregistered child. This reporting has additional benefits; it is paperless, thus reducing the likelihood of human error through difficult-to-read handwriting as well as being eco-friendly.
The project will be piloted in a few locations, inside one region where minorities live as well as in a few other villages in other regions. However, in the long term, the goal is to roll out the project to the whole of Kosovo.
The crucial risk here is still the cooperation of official authorities. Also, there is a danger that some of the families will willingly reject sharing information or registering their children. UNICEF Kosovo will work patiently to converse with official authorities to demonstrate positive examples of other similar initiatives and the results achieved. Meanwhile, efforts will be joined with other projects (e.g. EU) in awareness raising campaigns to explain the benefits of registration to families.
[1] http://www.unicef.org/kosovo/UNICEF_Birth_Registration_2009_English.pdf
