Mary Adgie

From Invisible Children to Legal Citizens

Due to a costly and lengthy birth registration process, only 16% of children under the age of five were registered in Tanzania in 2010. To fix this, Tanzania has partnered with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations to implement a new mobile birth registration system. Now, registration agents at health facilities can register children and give birth certificates immediately and free of charge. They will then send the registrations to a centralized system via SMS messages. My honors thesis will study the efficacy of this system and the impact of mobile technology through qualitative, quantitative, and experimental evidence. I will attempt to partner with UNICEF to access its data on the initiative and identify general trends of uptake of the system. I will also conduct interviews of the partners’ employees to better understand the initiative and what type of families participate most. Last, I plan to conduct an experiment to determine if mobile phone ownership will increase women’s likelihood and ability to register their children. I will do this through the existing research structure of REPOA, a Tanzanian research organization, by sending SMS messages that describe the importance and process of birth registration to REPOA’s participants. 

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