The right to legal identity remains a major issue in Burkina Faso, as it is a prerequisite for the exercise of all fundamental rights of the child. 

However, despite the efforts of the government and its partners, universal access to civil registration remains insufficient. According to the Directorate General for the Modernisation of Civil Registration (DGMEC, 2024), the rate of birth registration within the legal deadline of two months is only 60.65% at the national level, leaving nearly 4 out of 10 births undeclared within the legal deadline. This delay accumulates year after year, creating a large pool of people without birth certificates and compromising national and local development planning.

According to the World Bank, more than 6 million Burkinabe cannot prove their existence because they do not have a birth certificate (2018 study, cited by DGMEC). This deficit particularly affects children, women, and internally displaced persons (IDPs). In 2019, nearly 4 out of 5 displaced children (75%) under the age of 18 did not have a birth certificate (Protection Cluster, 2021), and as of 28 February 2022, CONASUR recorded 1,814,283 IDPs, 61.3% of whom were children, meaning that approximately 834,000 displaced children did not have a birth certificate.

In many communities, particularly rural ones, birth registration remains poorly understood and perceived as an administrative formality with no immediate importance. A survey conducted by Tin Tua in 2024 in the municipalities of Kaya and Tenkodogo revealed that 75% of parents of newborns had not registered the birth of their children within the legal time limit, often due to a lack of knowledge of the procedures, but also due to a lack of information about the usefulness of the document.

This situation is exacerbated by persistent social and cultural representations, illiteracy, and the limited availability of community representatives trained in civil status awareness.

Between 2022 and 2024, AMADE and ATT carried out a pilot project that enabled the regularisation of 10,000 children without birth certificates, including more than 4,000 internally displaced children. This project also helped build strong relationships with the national authorities in charge of civil registration and develop a framework for collaboration with various local actors to ensure the sustainability of child regularisation efforts. 

Building on these results, the current project aims to build on the solid foundations laid by the pilot phase by strengthening the framework for collaboration established to enable the regularisation of 45,000 children in three municipalities. This project also aims to go further by working with national authorities to test and document the implementation of an automated birth registration system through digitisation and interoperability with health services.