In a low-slung maternity clinic on the edge of a rural Ethiopian village, a mother cradles her newborn son as the nurse apologizes: the registration computer is down again. Currently, the baby has no official name in government records—only a paper slip that may never reach the national database.
Across Ethiopia, such moments capture the tension between technological ambitions and administrative realities. The government’s Vital Events Registration Agency (VERA), established in 2013, is responsible for recording every birth, death, marriage, divorce, and adoption and linking those records to a national identification system. Backed by UNICEF, the World Bank, and other partners, this initiative was envisioned as a cornerstone of the country’s digital transformation. Its mission is simple yet profound: to ensure that every Ethiopian is visible to the state from the moment of birth.
After a decade of reform, progress has been real, but uneven. According to Vital Strategies (2023), birth registration in Ethiopia now stands at 37 percent completeness, while death registration lags behind at 16 percent. The improvement marks a leap from the 3 percent rate reported by UNICEF in 2019, but it still leaves millions of children without any formal record of existence.
Cassadee Orinthia Yan—a researcher of nationality law, citizenship rights, and social inclusion governance at the Maslow Quest Foundation—describes the situation as “a paradox of visibility.” Technology, she said, can register births efficiently, but it cannot replace the social and political relationships that give identity meaning. “Digitization without reach,” she observed, “creates an illusion of inclusion.”
Nationality, Identity, and the Fragile Architecture of Belonging
Ethiopia’s Nationality Proclamation No. 378/2003 defines citizenship primarily through descent: a child is an Ethiopian citizen if either parent is an Ethiopian citizen. In theory, the law is inclusive and gender-neutral, aligning with international norms and standards. However, in practice, the absence of comprehensive civil registration weakens the law’s protections.
The 1995 Constitution guarantees equality among Ethiopia’s diverse nationalities, but the country’s federal structure, designed to celebrate autonomy, can also fragment identity. For children born in border areas, displacement zones, or refugee camps, documentation often depends on which administrative unit or even which official records the event.
Yan argues that nationality in law is hollow without proof of identity. “Birth registration is the bridge between citizenship as a legal concept and belonging as a lived experience,” she said. The government’s Proclamation No. 1049/2017, which established a digital civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system, was intended to build this bridge. Each certificate, linked to a national ID, would serve as both documentation and declaration—a guarantee that the state knows who its citizens are.
The Geography of Invisibility
Despite legal and institutional progress in Ethiopia’s civil registration system, birth registration coverage remains deeply uneven. A study published in BMC Sustainable Cities found that while registration rates remain very low overall, children born in urban areas are significantly more likely to be registered than those born in rural areas.
The reasons for this are both logistical and cultural. Many births still occur at home, attended by traditional midwives with no link to the government. Registration often requires travel, paperwork, and fees that are prohibitive for low-income or displaced families to afford. In places where the nearest registrar’s office is a day’s walk away, the system itself becomes inaccessible to the people.
A 2025 Ethiopian Tribune report highlighted the uneven digital rollout: while the new mobile civil registration platform has expanded its reach in some regions, it still accounts for only about 24 percent of total registrations. In areas with poor connectivity or unstable power, the electronic system remains largely symbolic.
These gaps have far-reaching implications for the field. Children without birth certificates cannot easily enroll in schools, access public healthcare, or prove their age for legal protection. For those born to refugee or internally displaced parents, the absence of registration can lead to lifelong exclusion from citizenship. “When the act of being counted depends on geography and class,” Yan noted, “the right to identity becomes a privilege.”
Technology Meets Tradition
The government’s digital registration project, part of its wider e-governance reform, has streamlined recordkeeping in hospitals and urban centers. Digital certificates can now be issued within days, with the data synced to national servers. However, in rural Ethiopia, where the state’s presence is inconsistent, the transition from paper to pixels has been much slower.
Many communities remain completely outside the system. In pastoralist areas, mobility and mistrust of the bureaucracy hinder registration. In conflict-affected regions, destroyed infrastructure and population displacement have interrupted records. Even when mobile registration vans reach remote areas, linguistic barriers, limited awareness, and poor follow-up often undermine the continuity of immunization.
According to UNICEF Ethiopia, the integration of birth registration services within healthcare delivery in internally displaced person (IDP) sites has enabled over 160,000 children to receive birth certificates through outreach efforts in conflict-affected regions in 2023.
Yan acknowledges these efforts but warns that the success of digitization depends less on bandwidth and more on trust. “Technology can record lives,” she said, “but only legitimacy can make them count.”
The Human Cost of Invisibility
The consequences of non-registration are the most severe among Ethiopia’s displaced populations. According to the UNHCR’s 2024 Protection and Solutions Strategy, the country currently hosts over 936,000 refugees—mainly from South Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan—and an estimated 3.8 million internally displaced people driven by conflict and climate shocks. In many of these communities, identity documents are lost, destroyed or never issued.
For families living in refugee camps or informal settlements, the absence of documentation perpetuates their exclusion. The UNHCR’s 2023 Annual Results Report for Ethiopia confirms that 15,181 refugee children were issued birth certificates through the national registration system that year, but the coverage remains a fraction of total births. Many children born in camps or displacement sites remain unregistered, caught in a bureaucratic gap between humanitarian assistance and state recognition of their existence.
Yan calls this “dual invisibility”: a layered exclusion where the unregistered disappear twice—first from the law, lacking identity or nationality, and then from the data, absent in the statistics guiding policy and aid. This distortion undermines equitable governance, producing blind spots in resource allocation, social protection, and metrics defining national progress.
Rebuilding Recognition
Experts increasingly agree that technology alone cannot achieve universal birth registration in Ethiopia. Administrative reform must be aligned with accessibility and public trust. Penalties for late registration often discourage families from participating, while integrating the process into existing health and education systems could make it routine rather than an exception. Expanding mobile registration units and empowering local authorities to reach remote and conflict-affected regions are essential steps toward inclusion.
However, the challenge is not only administrative but also moral. Birth registration is more than just an entry in a database; it is the state’s first act of recognition. It affirms that life counts and that a person belongs. As Yan observes, the success of reform will be measured less by servers or software than by empathy itself: “A nation’s modernity is not defined by the sophistication of its systems, but by the dignity it affords to the names inside them.”
Every Name a Beginning
Ethiopia’s quest for universal birth registration remains incomplete. The figures speak to both progress and persistence: roughly 37 percent of births are now officially recorded, leaving nearly two-thirds of children without a legal identity. Yet behind every new certificate lies something larger than data: a quiet act of inclusion, a restoration of belonging to the nation’s collective record.
Across the country, in clinics where electricity flickers and Internet signals fade, work continues. Registrars move from village to village, mothers wait patiently for their children’s names to be entered into the system, and a fragile but vital promise endures. If Ethiopia can close the gap between technology and trust, between data and dignity, it may yet realize the most fundamental duty of governance: to acknowledge every life and to ensure that every child — wherever born — is seen, counted, and named.
Cassadee Yan is a researcher and writer on the social justice dimensions of nationality law and can be reached via c@mq.org
