Hello, I'm Michael Sherraden. I'm the Director of the Center for Social Development at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. We test social innovations and wha-, I'm going to toss out an idea today for you to consider. And first, I'll present the issue and then talk about what are some aspects of that issue that might require a lot more thinking to solve this problem. Let me, let me start by saying I think this is a very big problem. I thinks it's solution is within reach. It's not an impossible problem to solve, but the world hasn't paid sufficient attention to it as yet. So hopefully, you can help with that. The problem is that about 36% of the children in the world are born without a legal identity. They have no birth registration. They officially belong to no country. They don't have identities that can protect them for for the rights that are, that are provided by the state. Oftentimes don't have rights to health care or education. Should their family be disrupted, they have no, they have no record of who they belong to or how they can get back to their family. So birth, this is just a small list, there's really much longer list of, of, of problems that are created by this. So, birth registration turns out to be a really important thing in the well being of, of, of children, and really, people all their lives. Without registration, it's pretty hard to function successfully in the world. Now, where do, where do young people not have birth registration? Turns out that in much of the world, at least double-digit percentages of children are unregistered at birth. The highest percentages are in Subsaharan Africa, where, where some countries have over 90% of children not registered. Also, very high percentages in in, in Asian sub-continent, in India and Bangladesh and Pakistan. and, but even in parts of the world that we think are, are, are, are very organized still, Latin America, for example, still double digit children not, not registered at birth. So this issue is, has been identified by, by international conventions, by, by the United Nations, by many treaties and so on, but not much has been done about it. So let's put this on the table. What would it take to get a legal identity, a birth registration, for every child in the world? This problem, let me suggest to you, has at least three kinds of issues. One is technological, because up until, up until the information age this would have had to be done on a piece of paper. The piece of paper would have to go from the village to the, to the capital. Where they would be all stored in a drawer somewhere. And you can imagine the problem with that. But today we have, we have information technology and ID information by, by various measures that could be, could be transferred much, much easier. But how to do that. Second is the, what I would call, the social issue. I think, even bigger than the technological issue. Which is, how do you organize that this birth identification information would be collected? And, and for every child. Even in the most remote parts of the world and, and assembled in some database. The third issue is political. Turns out not every government of every, of every nation wants to register all these children. Because registering all these children creates obligation to them as citizens. And these obligations include costs, so. And there are situations in, in, in conflict regions where, where not every nation wants to register every person for, for, because they will create other, other, other issues for them in, in having, having to manage the conflicts. These are big problems. The, the technological problems, the social problems, and the political problems. All of them will have to be solved. But they're not impossible. So, we need your help with this one. It's within reach, I think this problem could be solved by mid-century if people paid attention to it.
