The executive director of the National Council for Children and Adolescents (Conani), Alexandra Santelices is telling about efforts to get all babies registered when they are born in public hospitals. The Dominican civil registration gives parents a month to register their children. If they do so afterwards, the process is tedious and this results in many parents not registering the child, causing numerous problems to parents and child in the future.
Santelices said a new effort for the timely registration of births is implemented in 30 hospitals and work is being done to increase that number to 45, as reported in Diario Libre on 25 October 2022.
She said the program began with 21 public hospitals offering birth registration and has increased to 30. The goal is to reach 45 public hospitals. She said that at each of the hospitals, a staff person is assigned to encourage the parents to register the baby before leaving the hospital.
“The new approach is preventive,” she explained. “We do nothing by creating all the mechanisms, if we do not work so that boys and girls who are born have their birth registration in a timely manner,” she stressed.
She made the announcement after participating in a meeting of the timely birth registration committee with the president of the Cabinet of Children and Adolescents and First Lady of the Republic, Raquel Arbaje; the president of Conani, Luisa Ogando; and the special representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations on Violence against Children, Najat Maalla M’Jid.
In June 2022, the Cabinet of Childhood and Adolescence and Conani presented a new inter-institutional plan for timely and late birth registration that is implemented by ten public entities, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Fund (Unicef).
The presentation was made in an event headed by First Lady Arbaje, in her capacity as president of the Cabinet; the Central Electoral Board (JCE), the Ministry of Public Health, Strategic and Special Projects (Propeep), National Health Service (SNS), National Institute of Integral Attention to Early Childhood (Inaipi), Judicial Power, Attorney General’s Office, Supérate and the Ministry of Education (Minerd).
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
26 October 2022