The National Population Commission (NPC) on Monday said that legally speaking, 43 percent of Nigerians under the age of five never existed.



Delivering a keynote address at the Orientation Workshop on Birth Registration Messaging in Kaduna, an NPC programme sponsored by United Nations International Children Education Fund (UNICEF), the Chairman of the NPC, Mr. Eze Duruiheoma said: “In Nigeria, according to the 2013 demographic health survey, birth registration of under-five children is 57 per cent, while the remaining 43 per cent remain unregistered and in legal terms do not exist.”



The chairman of NPC, who was represented by the commission’s Director of Public Affairs, Mr. Simon Otene, revealed that the reason for this was as a result of ignorance of mothers and care givers on the importance of registering the births of their new born and obtaining certificates as evidence.”



He added: “The problem is compounded by the fact that three in every five births (62 per cent of all births) occur at home and only thirty-five per cent of births in Nigeria are delivered in health facilities.”

Duruiheoma further said: “The Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data indicated that women in urban areas are more than twice as likely to deliver in a health facility as their rural counterparts, 60 per cent to 25 per cent.”



He revealed that the South-east had the highest proportion of institutional deliveries of 74 per cent, followed by South-west with 70 per cent, while the North-west has the lowest with 8 per cent.



He insisted that women with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to deliver in a health facility than women with lower or no education, noting that women with more than secondary school education have 90 per cent, nine times more likely than women with no education at 10 per cent likelihood of delivery at health facility.



The NPC boss also lamented that reliable statistics and information on death registration was also difficult to come by in the nation and had affected the development of the nation.

He said: “Birth and death registration coverage of hard to reach areas in the northern part of the country remains persistently low. This is mainly due to lack of adequate public awareness on the importance of birth registration and ingrained socio-cultural beliefs that impacts negatively on registering births and deaths,”



The representative of UNICEF at the workshop, Mr. Geoffrey Njoku said the organisation was working with the media on birth registration, promising that: “We will be able to design work plan, send messages.”

He said: “We know that birth registration is important. How can we create news out of birth registration?”

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