Minister of Homeland Security Peter Mukhito says about 4.6 million children under the age of 16 remain unregistered and have no legal identity document.
He said on Friday in Lilongwe during a press conference on the start of national birth registration campaign that the concerned children were born before National Registration Bureau (NRB) started birth registration or that their registration was missed.
Mukhito said government cannot allow children to grow without legal identity, adding that the situation leaves a critical gap in the national population register under the National Registration and Identification System.
“Without any form of legal identity, these children face barriers to essential services and are at heightened risk of exploitation, statelessness, early marriages, child labour, child trafficking and exclusion from vital social and economic opportunities,” he said.
NRB Principal Secretary Patrick Machika said the campaign, which will be conducted in seven phases across 25 districts, will ensure that Malawi achieves Sustainable Development Goal target 16.9, which compels every country to ensure legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030.
The pilot phase, which was conducted in 2022 in Karonga, Lilongwe Rural East, Balaka and Mwanza, successfully registered 620 000 children who were issued with birth certificates.
In 2017, NRB expanded its services to register citizens aged 16 and above for national identity cards.
The National Registration Act, which came into operation in 2015, makes birth registration mandatory.
NRB has registered 3.8 million children since 2015.
The current exercise will require parents to provide their national identity numbers to register their children and will take place in government primary schools where designated primary school teachers will serve as registration officers.
To implement the exercise, NRB requires about K17.8 billion.
In the 2025/26 National Budget, government allocated K5.4 billion to cover the first two phases of the national birth registration campaign.
