Dakar — It was only when 12-year-old Senegalese schoolboy Lassou Samb prepared to sit his end-of-year exams that his lack of any legal documentation finally caught up with him.

Like many young people in the West African country, Samb was never registered at birth, an oversight with potentially profound consequences for his education.

Hundreds of thousands of Senegalese pupils are sitting exams until Wednesday to mark the end of their school year.

But Samb almost did not take the test needed to move onto the next grade because he lacked the required birth certificate.

Every year, the exam period highlights a major failure to register births, not just in Senegal but across Africa.

Of the more than 300,000 students registered for the end of elementary school exams, almost 70,000 had no civil status documents, the examinations department said.

The issue has potentially serious consequences ranging from the protection of rights, access to public services and government policy planning.

Samb, one of six children born in a village in central Senegal, was the only one in his family not to be registered.

“Our (school) director often calls me into his office to remind me that I haven’t brought my birth certificate yet, but I don’t know what to tell him,” he said.

Samb “was born with a fractured hand at a time when things were hard for us,” said his father Malick, a factory worker.

“The priority then was to treat him.”

Like previous administrations, Senegal’s new government this year ignored the rule requiring a birth certificate for exams and allowed children to sit them without.

Unregistered children

“There is no question of sacrificing these children twice,” said Moussa Bala Fofana, Minister for Local and Regional Authorities. 

“Firstly by not declaring them at birth, and secondly by preventing them from sitting their exams because they have no papers, even though they have nothing to do with it,” he said.

While 98 percent of births are registered in Europe, the number stands at just 44 percent in Africa, according to a 2024 WHO report.

More than half of the world’s unregistered children live in Africa, totaling around 91 million, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said in 2022.

Birth registration is a critical first step in access to healthcare, education and justice, and is also an essential tool in government planning for public health and development.

But long distances to registry offices, a lack of knowledge, local customs and, in some countries, discriminatory practices and fees can prevent parents from registering a birth, UNICEF said.

Some parents neglect or ignore the importance of birth certificates even though they have up to a year to register their child free of charge, said Aliou Ousmane Sall, Director of Senegal’s national civil status agency.

After this deadline, a court has to authorize the registration and parents must pay a fee of 4,000 CFA francs ($7).

Fraud

Obtaining a birth certificate can take several years due to the difficulty of accessing the necessary services, obsolete equipment and poorly trained officials.

“For most of our African countries, we had to make a transition from the colonial state to the post-colonial state,” said Oumar Ba, president of the country’s mayors’ association.

“As a result, many measures were not taken in time. Our states inherited a civil registry that was not well structured,” he added. 

The shortfalls are conducive to fraud, with concerns about identification number trafficking widespread in Senegal.

Seydina Aidara, 23, said he was about to sit his final high school exams when he discovered that his civil registration number had been stolen, preventing him from taking the test.

For Lassou Samb, a birth certificate would later allow him to get an identity card, passport or driving license.

But his father said that despite his efforts, he had not been able to complete the registration process.

The government has launched a plan to modernize and digitize the civil registry in a bid to improve access and minimize fraud.

Nineteen million records have already been digitized, said Sall, of the national civil status agency.

“With this program, the problems will soon be over,” he said.
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