Mar
16
Malawi introduces compulsory birth certificates
March 16, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Penny (6)
Madonna’s controversial adoption of a Malawian child and the growing child trafficking problem in Malawi has partly prompted the Malawian government this week to introduce compulsory birth certificates.
According to Lawrence Hussein of the National Registration Bureau in the office of President Bingu wa Mutharika: “Malawian children have no document to show when they were born. We can hardly tell who is a child. With the issuance of birth certificates, we will go a long way in addressing problems in the areas of child trafficking, child labour and child adoption.”
Under a registration system conducted by the National Statistics Office and sponsored by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), nine of Malawi’s 28 districts will be the first to introduce birth certificates. Birth certificates will be issued to all new born babies as well to all of the country’s 12 million citizens, half of whom are children under the age of 16.
Last year, UNICEF launched a study to determine the scale of the problems, after the local International Labour Organisation office said there was “a lot of child-trafficking for sex and labour in Malawi.”
The study results will be used to build up a case for comprehensive child protection legislation. Malawi is lacking in child protection laws and had been using a 1904 act which did not require its citizens to be registered at birth and deaths did not have to be reported to authorities. This has made it difficult to track and locate Malawian men, women and children who find themselves sex trade victims.
The U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report for June 2007 reveals that men, women and children are trafficked for forced labour and sexual exploitation. Children are usually trafficked for agricultural labor, cattle herding, domestic service, commercial sexual exploitation within Malawi and South Africa and sometimes to Europe.
There have been reports of European sex tourists recruiting children from holiday resorts alongside Lake Malawi. They are lured with the promise of better educational opportunities in Europe. However, once they arrive in Europe, the reality is very different. Instead they find themselves featured in pornographic videos, sexually exploited in private homes and sold to pedophile rings.
Malawian women are targeted by trafficking groups because they do not require a visa to enter the United Kingdom. Initial recruitment usually takes place through Malawian businesswomen with links to people smuggling syndicates. Once in Europe, the women are usually sold onto Nigerian traffickers for US$10,000 each.
In other anti-trafficking measures, Malawi chiefs in February united against child trafficking by setting up village action groups to educate about the dangers and penalties of child trafficking. The following month, the Ministry of Women and Child Development announced it was training 800 child rights protection workers to help protect Malawian children from human trafficking.
