Nigeria: Only 40 Percent of Nigerian Births Registered - NPC
[Leadership] The National Population Commission (NPC) has disclosed that only about 40 per cent of births in Nigeria are currently registered, despite the country recording more than five million births annually.
The National Population Commission (NPC) in Nigeria has revealed that just 40% of births are currently registered, despite the country seeing over five million births each year. Dr. Aminu Yusuf, the NPC chairman, highlighted this issue during the Africa Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Day celebrations in Abuja. He emphasized that low registration rates pose a significant challenge to developing a reliable national population database.
To tackle this issue, the NPC is set to launch a fully digital Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system on July 1, 2026, replacing the manual registration process. This digital system will streamline the registration of births, deaths, marriages, and other vital events, generating dependable data for governance and planning.
The NPC chairman also stressed the importance of increasing community participation and raising public awareness to boost registration coverage. The Commission is also working on decentralizing registration services to make them more accessible, particularly in rural and underserved communities. By 2026, about 4,000 of Nigeria's 8,809 wards, representing 46%, will have digital registration services, with the goal of achieving full coverage nationwide.
Written by urgent.news from AllAfrica Health's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
