Identity

Mobile app helps to register the births of more than three million children in Tanzania

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have set a global target to provide every person with a legal identity – including birth registration – by 2030. With this in mind, Tigo has helped to develop a Mobile Birth Registration service in Tanzania.

In 2014, only 16 per cent of under-5s in Tanzania had been registered despite a law that requires parents to register their child within 90 days of birth. Since 2016, Tigo has worked with Tanzania’s Registration, Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (RITA) and UNICEF to modernise the registration process through the use of mobile technology. As one mother in Tanzania notes, “It is very important for a child to have a birth certificate because they cannot be registered in school without one.”

Over the past few years, registrars have been able to use a mobile app to input the child’s details and send them to RITA so it can record them and issue a birth certificate. Tigo has provided technical expertise, mobile handsets and data and, to date, more than 3.6 million under-five children have now been registered and issued a birth certificate through this partnership (with an additional 1.1 million children expected to be registered by the end of 2019). Across the thirteen regions where the service is delivered, the overall level of registration and certification has increased from less than 10 per cent in 2012 (as per Tanzania’s nationwide census) to over 80 per cent in 2019. The service is expected to be rolled out throughout mainland Tanzania by 2022.

*Note that the video in this case study was published in October 2018 and figures have changed since then.

Back to impact area