Nigeria records about five million births every year, but millions of births and deaths still go unregistered, limiting access to legal identity and weakening the country’s demographic data, the National Population Commission (NPC) has said.
The commission disclosed that birth registration coverage has risen to 57 per cent, while death registration remains below 20 per cent, as it unveiled a nationwide digital registration platform designed to modernise Nigeria’s civil registration system.
Speaking in Abuja on Wednesday during the launch of the VitalReg platform under the Electronic Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (e-CRVS) system, Dr. Aminu Yusuf, NPC Chairman, said poor registration rates continue to deny many Nigerians official legal identity and undermine national planning.
“These gaps deprive many Nigerians of legal identity and limit the availability of reliable data needed for effective national planning,” Yusuf said.
He described the VitalReg platform, which became operational across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory on July 1, as one of the most significant reforms in Nigeria’s civil registration system.
According to him, the digital platform offers 24-hour online access to birth and death registration, digital certificate issuance, faster processing, reduced paperwork, and improved data validation.
Yusuf said the system would strengthen the country’s Civil Registration and Vital Statistics database while supporting interoperability across Nigeria’s digital identity ecosystem in line with the Federal Government’s digital transformation agenda.
To improve access to registration services, the NPC has established 4,011 registration centres across the country’s 774 local government areas and plans to increase the number to about 8,000 nationwide.
The commission is also partnering with the Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON), the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), UNICEF, and Barnksforte Technologies Limited to decentralise birth registration and make the service more accessible to communities.
Yusuf said the commission was also strengthening the capacity of registration personnel to ensure births and deaths are captured promptly and accurately through the new platform.
While the NPC has reviewed charges for specialised services such as certificate reissuance, record modification, attestation and verification, the chairman assured Nigerians that birth registration and birth notification services would remain highly subsidised.
“This review is not intended to create barriers to access. Birth registration and birth notification services remain highly subsidised, in line with the commission’s commitment to achieving universal registration,” he said.
The VitalReg platform is being deployed through a Public-Private Partnership with Barnksforte Technologies Limited, which will provide technical support, cybersecurity services and continuous system upgrades.
The latest initiative builds on ongoing efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s identity management system. Recently, UNICEF partnered with the NPC to integrate the National Identification Number (NIN) into digital birth registration, enabling children to receive NINs at birth while providing government with more reliable data for planning education, healthcare and other public services.
