Fairing audiences, awareness, computerization: the country puts double bites to register in the register with its entire population by 2030.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
Four children out of ten are not registered at birth in civil status in Niger. Nadia Salou, 12, is one of them. Like her sister Zeneba, 9, and little Abdoulkarim, 4, she only exists by her first name. His mother Aïchata Hassan gave birth at home and no state agent was present. Originally from the small rural village of Alzou in a remote area of the Tillabéri region (west), the young woman had sixty days to go and declare her children. But its low incomes, the distance from the city and the transport costs dissuaded it.
For five years, jihadist incursions have multiplied in the region known as the three borders between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. In Alzou, they came several times on a motorcycle. First to seize cattle heads. Then the village chief was killed. It was at this point that Ichata Hassan and his children decided to flee: they walked to the neighboring town, Sakoira, about thirty kilometers. Nadia, Zeneba and Abdoulkarim were registered at school. Life has resumed its course in this small town posed on the tar between Tillabéri and Ayorou.
But when registering Nadia for the access examination in 6
Civil status is an immense challenge for Niger, a country among the poorest in the world. “We have a culture focused on paper, but it is exceeded, we must use computers,” says Ibrahim Malangoni, the national civil status director. With strong support from the international community, Niger tries to reverse the trend. Organization of fairground audiences, awareness-raising, computerization of the sector, campaigns with NGOs … “We want to maximize operations to meet the objective of the whole population listed by 2030”, he explains.
“paper culture”
Today, children’s recording rate at birth is 60 %. But it is already “a remarkable rate because it is not so long ago, in 2007, we were barely 30 %”, according to Malangoni. The populations, “especially in the villages of bush”, he says, “are not yet in the logic of systematizing the recording, they always expect that there is the need”.
These needs are however legion: to register a child in school, to access justice, to benefit from a scholarship, to open a bank account, to vote, or simply to pass a police check , an identity card is requested. “With a minor investment (of the state and international donors), you can provide these boys and these girls in the youngest in the world of hope,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the NGO Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), very invested in these questions of access to civil status.
Katoumi Youssou, sitting on a mat in the shade of a tree a few meters away, has only his voice to pester. This producer of Sakoira onions have never had any papers: “We women, we travel little and in the village, we don’t need that!” But the arrival of the war turned upside down, the Army control posts have multiplied in recent years, and, undocumented, their passage has become a hell. To go and sell your onions in town, to go to a wedding, “each time I have to pay the military to let me pass”.
Like Aïchata Hassan, the cultivator awaits the next arrival of a fair hearing judge to be regularized. She does not however accept that we question her identity: “I have no document, but I remain Nigerien, nobody can tell me the opposite!” And to add with a smile: “Only, It’s true, my “Nigerianity” may be incomplete. “