Government-funded programmes and services for vulnerable - Unicef

Department of Home Affairs
(ii) This process is likely to be changed to become more onerous once the Births and Deaths Registration Amendment Bill
becomes law and the relevant Regulations relating to the application procedures for registration are promulgated. See
discussion later in this chapter with regards to the proposed Bill.
(iii) The Births and Deaths Registration Amendment Bill makes provision for the designation of undertakers running funeral
parlours, upon application, for the purpose of registering deaths and requires that the Director-General of Home Affairs keeps
a register of all designated undertakers (Article 8).
Some key policy and service delivery gaps
It is a well-established fact that vulnerable children are particularly at risk of not being
able to access their enabling documents. This aggravates their vulnerability. This review
will explore some of the policy and service delivery disjunctures contributing to this risk
for three particularly vulnerable groups of children: children living in poverty, very young
children, and children affected by HIV/AIDS.
Children living in poverty
Over the past eight years there has been a general increase in the number of birth
registrations in South Africa. In 2009, the births of 85 per cent of children were registered
in the year of their birth (Stats SA 2010b: 2). This was an increase from 25 per cent in
1998. However, these improvements conceal pockets of poor registration in impoverished,
especially rural, communities. Those who are poorest continue to have the poorest access
to enabling documents.
There is a provincial and local variability in the proportion of children whose births are
not registered, with a strong correlation between poverty and poor birth registration rates.
The provinces with the greatest proportion of poor children have the lowest proportion of
births registered in the year of birth. The situation is particularly severe in predominantly
rural provinces. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal in 2005, only 62 per cent of births were
registered in the year of birth, compared with 97 per cent in the Western Cape (Giese &
Smith 2007; Stats SA 2006).
In KwaZulu-Natal, the birth registration rate is worst in the more rural areas. A survey
conducted in 2005 in the rural Umkhanyakude district showed that between 10 per cent
and 45 per cent of children attending primary school did not have a birth certificate
and between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of children at high school did not have birth
certificates. In 2003, a survey conducted by the Media in Education Trust of 35 schools in
the rural areas of Mt Ayliff, Dudumeni and Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape revealed that 51
per cent of learners did not have birth certificates (in Giese & Smith 2007: 28).
Reasons for poor access to enabling documents
● A tendency by local community members and caregivers not to recognise the
intrinsic importance of birth registration and enabling documents. 13
● The multiplicity of supporting documents that are required to effect a late birth
registration (after the age of one), the difficulty of obtaining these documents and
the complexity of the types of documents that are required inhibit birth registrations
(Giese & Smith 2007).
● The cost of transport to travel to Home Affairs (which is aggravated by the need for
multiple visits), the cost of obtaining supporting documents, the cost of photocopies
for certification purposes and the cost of photographs (Giese & Smith 2007).
13 This finding is supported by three separate research reports: Giese and Smith (2007), Peters and Williams (2009) and
Save the Children UK (2006).
13