ABUJA, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- The number of unregistered children during birth in Nigeria has hit 19 million, a worrisome development which has a lot of implications in the country, said the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Monday.
Among the implications of a weak birth registration system include planning blindly, incapacity to generate relevant public health data and national estimate and population planning, said Sharon Oladiji, the child protection specialist of UNICEF.
The UNICEF official told reporters in the northwestern state of Kano that Nigeria follows India, which has 71 million, among the 10 countries with the largest number of unregistered children in the world.
She said in Nigeria the children most affected by low registration are those of the poor parents, uneducated and leaving in slums, very rural and hard to reach communities.
Such children, she further said, may never be registered, counted or accounted for to access social services.
Children single mothers, teenage mothers, out of school and uneducated girls have such challenges, she added.
