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The right of children to be registered at birth was not part of early universal declarations of entitlements for the young adopted in the wake of the First World War. But during the interwar years, the main proponents of these declarations — the Save the Children International Union and the American Child Health Association, headed by philanthropist and future President Herbert Hoover — soon understood that the registration of infants was at the basis of their work, especially that concerned with the reduction of infant mortality. This chapter studies their respective campaigns in Africa and in the United States, respectively, to show how registration came to be understood as a prerequisite for the full promises of children's rights to be realized. It draws surprising parallels between the two efforts, related to the size of the territory and the discrimination faced by children due to their race and their ethnic origins.

In April 1998, the post-apartheid South African government introduced a monthly cash transfer for children in poor households. A requirement for getting the grant was that the birth of the child had to be registered, and the adult primary caregiver had to have the citizen identity document. The success of the system of support was contingent on the new democratic government's ability to integrate into one national welfare system what had been fragmented under apartheid into many racially separated systems; it also, ironically, built on the apartheid-era state pension delivery system. Within a decade the grant reached more than ten million children, and was associated with a rapid increase in birth registrations, marking the poorest children's first step into citizenship, and opening up the possibility of later access to other programmes and entitlements.

The central argument of How We Became Our Data is that over the past century we have become informational persons whose lives are increasingly conducted through an information politics. This chapter tracks emergent informational persons in the contexts of the bureaucratizing paperwork of the standardized birth certificate in the United States. Haphazard at the turn of the last century, the standardization of birth registration took three decades of effort beginning in 1903, and involved a panoply of agencies including the Census Bureau, the Children’s Bureau, the American Medical Association, and the American Child Health Association. The project was considered completed when, in 1933, every state was registering 90 percent of its births. Shortly after the development of the informational infrastructure that made this early ‘Big Data’ project possible, the Social Security Board would assign Social Security numbers to more than 90 percent of eligible American workers in just three months in the Winter of 1935. Building on the work of political scientist James Scott, this chapter attends to the formats of birth certificates and standard registration in order to excavate the informational conditions at the heart of the most important moments of registration in the lives of Americans today.

This chapter takes an empirical and pragmatic view of legal identity, birth registration, and inclusive development questions. Intensive research and experiences in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Cambodia provide the basis for the empirical information. A connection between legal identity documentation and access to benefits and opportunities, and between birth registration and human rights protection, is described, with Nepal as the empirical source. Barriers including financial, legal, and political, among others, in obtaining birth registration documentation in Nepal’s context are also discussed. A case study on the risks related to the demand-based approach to birth registration based on Bangladesh’s empirical data is presented.

This chapter, drawing on the experience of Plan International, describes the utilisation of birth registration as a tool to prevent child trafficking. In many countries, failure to register births often happens on a large scale because of a failure of government resources, inadequate administrative procedures, family poverty, a lack of awareness, limited political will, and corruption. Parents are also often discouraged by the prospect of taxation or even by the fear that registered children become, in due course, ‘visible’ for conscription into armies or slave armies. Yet this registration is the key to claiming a host of rights: in a sense it defines the child as existing at all, hence its enshrinement in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Articles 7 and 8). It opens the way to healthcare, education, nationality, and to the formal labour market. In other words, birth registration can be an effective means of protecting children, preventing sexual exploitation, and prosecuting cases of child slavery.

The registration of households has a long history in China, from the imperial period to the People’s Republic of China. The baojia system of security and local registration was used in China from its inception during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) to the Republican period (1912–1949). After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party began massive registration campaigns. The household registration (hukou) law was introduced in 1958. Incessant problems associated with local leader autonomy and inconsistent reporting persisted from the traditional baojia into the current hukou system. Indeed, birth registration was a challenge for the Chinese Communist Party from the beginning and continued to be so into the reform era, especially with the massive administrative changes and decentralization in rural China that began in 1979. Uneven implementation meant that the birth registration process was inconsistent over time and geographically across rural China.

In addition to the detailed descriptive analyses of childhood cancer incidence, survival and mortality that are presented in this book, the registry data have contributed to international studies of incidence and survival. Detailed geographical information on the cases in the registry has been used to study variations in incidence in relation to environmental factors that also vary geographically, and to ecological features of small areas such as socioeconomic status, urban/rural status and population density. Some aetiological studies make use of birth registration details which are held for most children in the registry and for matched control children. Aetiology has also been investigated through record linkage studies. The relation between patterns of care and survival from childhood cancer has been investigated in a series of studies. The registry is a resource for a wide range of information and statistics on childhood cancer in the UK.

In response to global initiatives, Indonesia has increased efforts to register all children at birth. Birth registration has a core goal to transform the act of childbirth into a legal statement about the obligations and entitlements of belonging to a nation-state. Drawing upon a multi-method exploratory study conducted in 2014 in four low-income, high out-migration Sasak communities in East Lombok, this chapter discusses childbirth and birth registration practices in families where the mother or father leave the island for extended periods of low-skill, temporary work. Migration, Sasak pregnancy practices, state childbirth management, and the meaning of documents become bound up with procedures by which the state seeks to align kin and other local relatedness in conformity with membership in the state. Despite the institutionalization of midwives as agents of birth registration, the limited success of state efforts to register children is evident in the ways that migrant families navigate, circumvent, ignore, and selectively exploit the official system, thereby supporting their priorities around work and family. The implications of these patterns for Indonesian birth registration goals are noted.

This book explores the effects of the absence of legal identity and statelessness on children in different parts of the world, and discusses the relationship between birth registration and statelessness that affects the economic and social rights of the children. Lack of birth registration by illegal/irregular immigrants is discussed, along with the discrimination on the part of states in different countries providing basic rights for stateless children. Children’s dependency on the state for basic services makes statelessness an important child-rights issue, both politically and socially. Invisibility on the part of policymakers as a possible cause of child statelessness is discussed, as are legal identity and citizenship concepts that apply to children.

This chapter discusses the origination of identity registration in England in the late fourteenth century, which was designed to prevent the possibility of statelessness. It highlights the reasons, including the government’s lack of assurance of social security to an individual along with incomplete birth registration documents, among others, which are responsible for statelessness, rather than only the financial difficulties that are responsible for identity registration concerns. The chapter states that identity registration systems can work in poor countries, providing the case example of England originating identity registration in the fourteenth century, only if political, economic, and administrative difficulties can be countered.

This chapter examines the issue of trafficking through the lens of a human rights approach. It argues that human rights, when fully implemented, provide a foundation to strengthen communities and reduce the vulnerability of children to sex trafficking. The chapter calls on governments and civil society to focus on rights that can further the goal of preventing child sex trafficking. In particular, the following rights offer significant potential for reducing vulnerability and protecting children from sex trafficking: the right to be free from all forms of discrimination; the right to birth registration; health rights; the right to education; and labour rights. Importantly, while the focus of the chapter is sex trafficking, these rights, when fully ensured, can help prevent other forms of trafficking and exploitation of children. The chapter also stresses the importance of a multi-organisational or multi-sectoral approach to child trafficking, one that does not depend on narrow policing, immigration, or social-welfare interventions.