By 2030, provide legal identify for all, including birth registration

DLA Piper partnered with UNICEF to improve birth registration practices by reviewing legislation in numerous jurisdictions across Africa and Asia to assess the consistency and adequacy of the laws in place and target advocacy efforts for key areas for change. The legislative review included a questionnaire for each country to assess whether birth registration is required for access to education, health care and other essential services. (Source)

The ID2020 Alliance is a public-private partnership that seeks to advance digital identity programmes through direct funding as well as through evaluating ongoing digital identity programmes — working with partners to implement such programmes — and helping to share technical standards governing digital identity initiatives. Partners include businesses, foundations, law firms and non-governmental organizations. (Source) 

Uganda’s paper-based system for birth registration poses significant challenges, particularly regarding children born outside of hospitals for whom receipt of birth certificates can take months if they arrive at all. In response, the Ugandan birth registration services bureau is working with Uganda Telecom Limited and UNICEF to automate the registration of births, deaths and marriages through its Mobile Vital Record System to replace paper forms with the use of mobile phones and web-based applications to capture and transmit relevant data directly onto a Government server. (Source)

Indonesia is a religiously diverse country where cultural tensions are all too often exacerbated by local poverty. Thirty-six per cent of households cannot afford the cost of marriage licenses and without an officially recognized marriage, Indonesian couples cannot obtain identity cards, access health care or obtain birth certificates for their children. Collaborating with business, Government and religious institutions, the initiative facilitates mass weddings where thousands of couples and their children have gained immediate legal status and a renewed hope for the future. This project is a collaborative undertaking by the participating companies of the Global Compact Network Indonesia with the support of provincial governments, non-governmental organizations and universities. It aims to help poor families to obtain their legal identity so that they can access education, health, formal employment, micro-credits and other public services. (Source)

Executives from 79 Global Compact Network Brazil participant companies and a team of experts have collaborated in generating a report that has highlighted the main obstacles to migrants’ integration in the local market, focusing on companies’ human resources and social responsibility policies. Such obstacles include the limited availability of information and ability to advertise opportunities among the migrants’ community, lack of communication skills and problems with identification documentation required by human resources departments to move from intentions to actions. The research has a special focus on gender issues of the migrant workers and underlines the need to scale effective practices on the part of businesses to reach more migrants. The project’s next step is to use the report conclusions to initiate a series of capacity building workshops to help facilitate legal assistance to migrants in Brazil and promote their access to labour markets. (Source)

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) together with Lambda Legal secured a win in the state of Kansas in the United States in the matter of Foster v Andersen, Civil Action No. 18-02552-DDC-KGG in which the ability of transgender people to obtain birth certificates that reflect their gender identity was put into question. BCLP and Lambda Legal argued that denying transgender people the ability to obtain accurate birth certificates violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the United States Constitution. The United States District Court of Kansas ruled that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and other Kansas government officials must provide accurate birth certificates that reflect a person’s true sex, consistent with their gender identity. (Source)