Civil Status Registration : Judicial Actors Sharpen Skills

The low rate of civil status registration and difficult access to civil status documents are real obstacles to the exercise of formal citizenship and hinder the acquisition of legal personality in Cameroon. Official figures indicate that only 66% of children under five years have a birth certificate and statistics from the Ministry of Basic Education in 2020 reveal that 1,587,668 pupils (32%) go to school without a birth certificate. To improve on this status, the National Civil Status Office known by its French acronym as BUNEC with sponsorship from the European Union under the Cameroon Civil Status Improvement Project for Active Citizenship (PASECA) has embarked on a series of activities to improve the civil status registration.
Against this backdrop, a workshop for Judicial Actors in civil service took time off to examine some of the blockages in the improvement of civil status registration in Cameroon and came out with recommendations to make the situation better. During the workshop on May 25, the Assistant Director-General of BUNEC, Abdoulaye Adjiali Boukar explained that civil status registration is important for the development of every country. He added that to fully enjoy his or her status as a citizen or resident, each individual must have documents that identify him or her as a subject of law within the country. 
This is why, in the context of emerging Cameroon, the issue of access to civil status documents has emerged as a key requirement. He disclosed that in 2007 the government undertook a reform process in the civil Status registration sector, which took the form of the Cameroon Civil Status Rehabilitation Programme (PR2C) and laid the legal and organizational foundat...