Some 150,000 children displaced by the conflict in Mali do not have birth certificates and are at risk of exclusion and deprivation of rights because they cannot prove their identity, the Norwegian Refugee Council has warned.
“Thousands of children are excluded from society when they should be in school,” said Maclean Natugasha, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) for Mali, in a statement released by the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to AFP.
These 148,000 children are among the 422,620 people displaced by the war in Mali, according to August data from a joint United Nations (UN)-Malian authorities monitoring tool.
The children lost their birth certificates when they fled their homes or “never had them due to the limited functioning of vital registration services in some regions,” the NRC said.
In this country of some 20 million inhabitants, 7.5 million need emergency humanitarian aid, according to the UN.
Mali has been in crisis since a 2012 uprising when rebel soldiers ousted the then president.
The state – dominated by the military since 2020 – currently has a limited presence in the vast jungle where terrorist fighters affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, bandits and drug traffickers, armed militias and politico-military groups operate on a large scale. ., who signed a peace agreement.
If this marital status issue “is not resolved before these children reach adulthood,” the NRC warns, “they risk being deprived of their freedom of movement, the right to vote, and the ability to own or rent a property”.
Insurgents remain active in Mali and extremist groups have moved from the arid north into central Mali, fueling animosity and violence between ethnic groups in the region, forcing the displacement of tens of thousands of people.
Source: TSF
