Pakistan has one of the lowest birth registration rates in the world, according to statistics approximately 1.1 billion people across the globe weren’t registered at birth and lack any official form of identification. Around 366 million of them are children with 60 million belonging from Pakistan alone.
One of the main reasons for low birth rate registration are the social and economic factors, along with the fact that registering birth is also a tedious process, especially for children born at home or in remote areas. Furthermore, birth registration is critical in Pakistan because it is a prerequisite for obtaining a birth certificate, national identification cards, and passports and in some provinces, for school enrollment. The birth registration data is also utilized by government to deliver socio-economic services and helps in planning health care and constructing new school facilities.
In order to tackle the problem of birth registrations in the country, Telenor Pakistan came up with a solution to develop the first-of-its-kind Digital Birth Registration (DBR) using mobile technology. According to Telenor officials DBR is a marriage of the efficiency, outreach, and ease that technology brings, combined with the legal and policy requirements of registering a child in Pakistan. The pilot version of the program was launched in 2014.
Telenor Pakistan DRB app was initially only handed to Authorized Personnel that included health workers, marriage registrars, and staff at Telenor distribution points. From where the workers and registrars moved from one house to another while Telenor distribution centers served as a point of contact which attracted members of the community of their mobile-related needs as well. The authorized personnel then reported birth-related data along with required documentation directly to the approving authority via the app along with maintaining a dashboard for government authorities to monitor the progress for future decision making.
Recently UNICEF has teamed up with Telenor to scale the DBR to other developing countries and Myanmar is the first market where it has been replicated. Both UNICEF and Telenor have signed a partnership agreement for a Mobile Birth and Death Registration (MBDR) project that is being endorsed by the Government of Myanmar.
Speaking on the occasion, UNICEF Representative to Myanmar, June Kunugi said,
“We enter this partnership having witnessed the results of a recent birth registration campaign in Myanmar that opened the door for children to go school and access other basic services. The support from Telenor Group will be a game changer in allowing UNICEF to support the Government of Myanmar to reach all children through establishing a digital vital statistics system.’
The MBDR is to be soon launched in Mon State, south eastern Myanmar, where the pilot will allow midwives to enter birth and death registration on a smartphone application. Enabling the township health offices to receive and register this information and issue certificates using a digitalized recording system instead of the previously manual method.
According to the agreement, the program will be an extension to the electronic platform (eVR) to archive birth and death records at Union that is already being used in Myanmar. The new pilot is to be based on experiences from a first-of-its-kind Digital Birth Registration pilot carried out by Telenor in Pakistan, together with UNICEF and local Governments.
The pilot will include training local health workers visiting newborns for health check-ups to also registering the births via a mobile app. The pilot has already seen an increase in birth registration from 30 percent to 90 percent in just six months.
The goal of the DBR is to register 700,000 children by end of 2018, covering a total of nine districts in Punjab and Sindh provinces. Telenor Group has a global ambition of facilitating access to identity for seven million across its footprint by 2020.
Furthermore, Telenor will be granting free data access to MBDR’s web-based platform and provide training to midwives on how to register information and manage the digital system along with financial support.
