Exploring the Interface Between Birth Registration and Citizenship Determination: A Scoping Study in Seven Countries in Southern Africa In other countries, however, “acquisition” is used to cover both attribution at birth and later acquisition based on an application process.14 ii. Birth Registration Legal Concepts Civil registration is the “the continuous, permanent, compulsory and universal recording of the occurrence and characteristics of vital events pertaining to the population, as provided through decree or regulation in accordance with the legal requirements in each country.”15 Laws on civil registration set out the process and typically designate an agency and/or officials that have the power to register births. In this paper, the responsible agency and officials are referred to as the civil registration authorities. Birth registration is a process within civil registration by which the birth of a child is officially recorded with the government, establishing the child’s legal identity.16 At a minimum, birth registration establishes the name of the child, date of birth, place of birth, and identity of the parent(s). Linkage to the ID System The specific processes of birth registration vary from country to country. However, there is consensus, as reflected in the United Nations Legal Identity Agenda, that a person’s legal identity is first established through birth registration and that the civil registration system should be linked and interoperable with the national identity system.17,18 Specifically, the UN recommends that data from birth registration be transmitted to a country’s identity and/or population register (automatically if digitalized). This is facilitated by the issuance of a unique identification number (UIN) at birth.19 The UIN—which may be generated by the civil registration or identity system or a population register—is assigned for life; it is typically stored in the birth register and may be printed on the birth certificate. The UN recommends that if a UIN is assigned at birth, the characters used in the UIN sequence should be random and unintelligible; in other words, the sequence should not reflect personal characteristics such as citizenship, residency or refugee status, as this may make people vulnerable to discrimination.20 This recommendation is reinforced in recent World Bank guidance for Building Statelessness-Sensitive ID Systems.21 Citizenship may change during the course of a person’s lifetime, and therefore characters reflecting such status would require recharacterization of the UIN sequence.22 Recharacterizing a UIN not only undermines the integrity and permanence of identity records across systems, but also creates confusion and practical difficulties for the person, who may face mismatched records, service access problems, and potential identity verification errors It is also common practice that parents' details are verified from the identity or population register during the course of birth registration. Therefore, ideally, the civil registration and ID systems are linked, and data is exchanged seamlessness to ensure a unique and trusted identity of all residents from birth to death.23 Overall, countries around the world are increasingly linking their civil registration and ID systems to strengthen identity proofing—a trend clearly visible in Southern Africa, where Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe already operate integrated identity system models, while Madagascar is in the process of linking its systems. 12