The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has urged parents to register their children at birth, describing the process as the foundation for a child’s legal identity and a gateway to essential services and opportunities throughout life.

UNICEF Chief of Field Office in Lagos, Celine Lafoucriere, made the call on Tuesday in Lagos at a two-day media dialogue on birth registration organised in partnership with the National Population Commission (NPC), Lagos.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the dialogue, themed “Giving Every Child a Legal Identity by Driving Birth Registration in Nigeria,” brought together journalists from states across the South-West and Edo State to strengthen media reporting and public awareness on birth registration.

Lafoucriere said birth registration was more than an administrative procedure, stressing that it formally establishes a child’s existence and relationship with the state.

According to her, a child’s legal identity is essential to accessing services and exercising rights at different stages of life.

“Civil registration is the child’s identity, and it is the foundational right of every child,” she said.

She explained that children whose births were properly registered would be better positioned to access education, healthcare and social protection, while the legal identity would remain important into adulthood.

Lafoucriere noted that such documentation could also become relevant when individuals seek to vote, own property or inherit assets.

She expressed concern that some parents continued to postpone registration because unregistered children could still obtain certain government services, making the need for registration appear less urgent.

The UNICEF official, however, warned that the consequences of poor birth registration extended beyond individual children to government planning and the delivery of social interventions.

She said accurate civil registration data was necessary for the government to determine the number of children and families requiring public services and allocate resources appropriately.

Lafoucriere said UNICEF was working with the Nigerian government to develop a reliable social register for the distribution of assistance to vulnerable households.

She explained that children without legal identity could be left out of such databases, making it difficult for government programmes to adequately account for their needs.

“If there are 3.5 million children who are not registered, it means that 3.5 million times whatever the budget is normally for one child is not in the government’s budget,” she said.

She therefore called on the media to intensify public education on birth registration by highlighting real-life experiences of parents and children and providing information on where registration services could be obtained.

According to her, journalists could play an important role in reaching families who may be isolated, vulnerable or unaware of the importance of registering their children.

She identified Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) and designated community registration points equipped with the required devices as some of the locations where parents could access registration services.

Earlier, the Lagos State Director of the NPC, Sherifdeen Kekere-Ekun, said the media dialogue was designed to improve public understanding of birth registration and address misconceptions surrounding the process.

Kekere-Ekun encouraged journalists to deploy different media platforms, including news reports, radio programmes, television broadcasts, feature stories and social media campaigns, to educate parents about the importance of obtaining legal identity for their children.

He said effective media coverage should communicate that birth registration was not merely a bureaucratic requirement but a mechanism for securing children’s rights and improving their access to education, healthcare, inheritance, voting and social protection.

He also urged journalists to provide practical information on registration locations, particularly PHCs and community centres where registration equipment, including tablets, was available.

Kekere-Ekun added that the media had a responsibility beyond public enlightenment, describing journalists as watchdogs capable of mobilising communities and holding government institutions accountable for improving birth registration.