Birth Registration Using SMS Technology 

Overview

Universal Birth Registration is an issue in many regions of the world. Particularly in Africa and South Asia as well as the Balkans. In the Balkans, almost none of the countries have a 100% birth registration rate. Birth registration 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.

The Official Public Registrars currently do not have the resources to collect the information about all births in Kosovo. As a result, they require a method that allows them to report births quickly, easily and with no paper involved. In Kosovo, there are currently no solutions with technology involved in the area of child registration. There are NGOs who do field work in offering legal aid to families who have not registered their members, but this is all paper based and thus works at a slower pace to identify the families and unregistered persons.  

Ultimately, the need is to bring the registration services to families who are not aware or cannot afford them as they are currently offered.

SMS has already been used as a means of data collection for birth registration in various places. Including Uganda, Nigeria and Senegal. Furthermore, smartphone data collection applications 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 based project.            

Volunteers will initially be the people searching for the unregistered children and thus are the ones for whom the mobile technology is for. They will have contact and visit families where there are potentially unregistered children. These children are often located in remote rural areas or in areas where there are mainly minorities. On finding an unregistered child, a notification is sent via text message to the civil registration Office.

The project will mean that the volunteers will be able to quickly and accurately identify and alert authorities of unregistered children. 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.  

Currently, the system has been set up and is under performance testing. 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, we have opted out against including phone numbers of parents, particularly mothers, in the SMS reporting.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.  

[1] http://www.unicef.org/kosovo/UNICEF_Birth_Registration_2009_English.pdf