Around 150,000 displaced children in Mali, more than half of all displaced minors in the African country, lack birth certificates and risk exclusion in the absence of documents proving their legal identity, the non-governmental organization Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) warned on Monday.
The NGO said in a statement that this situation deprives the 148,000 or so affected of their most basic rights as citizens and warned that while the Malian authorities are investing in the restoration of public services and institutions, the lack of documents has a profound and lasting impact on displaced children.
Thus, he detailed that the affected minors are unable to enroll in school, take exams or obtain educational certificates, which affects their chances of obtaining formal employment in the future.
«Thousands of children are being cut off from society when they should be at a desk in school,» said NRC Mali Country Director Maclean Natugasha. «Ensuring that the children hardest hit by the conflict can obtain their birth certificate is essential to enable them to overcome the violence, displacement and hunger they have faced since the beginning of the conflict,» he said.
The NRC has specified that these children either lost their birth certificates when they fled their homes or never had one due to the limitations of official institutions in certain parts of the country. As a result, in order to recover or obtain them, families are involved in complex legal processes that sometimes take months.
Furthermore, the costs of these processes, which are not legally defined, often lead to prohibitive prices for families who are already in a situation of poverty. The NGO therefore stresses the need to solve these problems to prevent children from being left without freedom of movement, the right to vote or to rent property, among other issues.
«Access to civil documentation is a right for all Malian citizens under international Human Rights laws and the Malian Civil Status Strategy, adopted in 2018,» Natugasha reminded. «The current legal framework must accommodate the extremely precarious situation of displaced children by making procedures more flexible and free of charge. Otherwise, the future of thousands of children will be in jeopardy,» he concluded.
Mali, like other Sahel countries, has been experiencing in recent years an increasing number of jihadist attacks by both Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region and the Islamic State, which has also increased inter-communal violence and caused the displacement of tens of thousands of people, a situation that has deepened the serious humanitarian crisis.
