Birth registration is a legal process by which a child's name, age, and date of birth are recorded and registered. It is also a vital tool for child protection. The process is used to track births, to inform policy, and to ensure that children receive necessary health and educational services www.bdris.gov.bd. Without a birth certificate, a child could miss critical services. However, it is a challenge to record and register births effectively. In many countries, registries are incomplete or not accessible.

Among high-income nations, nearly universal birth registration is a norm. However, in low- and middle-income countries, birth registration is less common. Moreover, the cost of obtaining a birth registration can be a significant barrier to people living in poverty. To make matters worse, many registration offices are inaccessible to women.

Birth registration is a legally recognized right under article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states that "all persons have the right to register their birth and to obtain a certified copy of their birth record". Registration is also a requirement for receiving social assistance, signing up to vote, and receiving vaccines. Despite these benefits, a number of children still do not have a birth certificate. Many live in countries with no birth registry, or in border regions where statelessness is common.

For example, 74 million births occur in countries that lack registries, and approximately one quarter of all children under the age of five have never been recorded. Some of these children are in remote rural areas, where the services available are limited. And in some countries, ethnic minorities are not included in the birth registry. As a result, these groups have lower rates of registration than national averages.

The world has made some substantial progress on birth registration over the past 20 years, but substantial challenges remain. A recent study by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has identified several barriers to universal birth registration. These include:

In most countries, the primary source of data for birth registration is household surveys. This is a crucial source for monitoring the trend in registration. Moreover, households are often located in rural areas, where access to registration offices is difficult.

Several low-income countries, including Guinea-Bissau and Lesotho, have a registration rate below the global average. Other countries, such as Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, register only a fraction of births. There are some countries that register more than half of all births, but these are not the norm. Nevertheless, birth registration is a critical tool for child protection, especially in times of crisis bdris. Moreover, birth registration statistics are useful to measure data accuracy and timeliness, and to quantify the policy utility of birth registration.

Although the global database on birth registration statistics is based on over four thousand country-years of data, it covers only the period 1948-2015. During this period, 145 countries provided data to the database. Most of these countries have baseline data for age 0-4 and a range of ages based on their current needs.