Overview

Around 150 million children under age 5 (or 2 in 10) have not had their birth officially recorded and another 55 million (or 3 in 10) lack a birth certificate (UNICEF 2024(opens in new tab)). Achieving universal birth registration is part of the Sustainable Development Goals (target 16.9(opens in new tab)). Many governments around the world are working to close birth registration gaps by 2030. These are important efforts to protect children’s human rights to an identity and a nationality. But solving the problem of non-registration is not a straightforward task when migration control and marginalization of minority groups are at play.

Around the world migrants’ descendants face a heightened risk of non-registration and statelessness—and not only in contexts of forced migration. As states securitize both identity and migration management systems, how might the introduction of ‘bordering practices(opens in new tab)’ prevent racialized people on the move from proving their identity and claiming citizenship—in any country—for their children?

This website presents findings from Birth Registration as Bordering Practice, a research and book project that examines global patterns of inequality in access to legal citizenship because of blocked access to birth certificates. Through content analysis of UN treaty body recommendations, government, and civil society reports, the project tracks how states produce a risk of statelessness among the children of migrants (and other marginalized population groups) by restricting access to birth certificates and proof of citizenship.

Birth registration bordering practices are classified into different types of bordering: corporeal, social, spatial-mobile, spatial-territorial, and temporal. These are searchable by country and type of practice on the Map(opens in new tab) and Countries(opens in new tab) pages.

The site aims to make scholarly research findings available to practitioners and researchers, to help recognize and address exclusionary birth registration practices. Understanding the political reasons why certain children remain unregistered can help to achieve the goal of universal birth registration and to prevent and address child statelessness.