Malawi to combat child trafficking

Malawi is to introduce compulsory birth certificates to help combat child trafficking, the government announced on Monday.

"Malawian children have no document to show when they were born. We can hardly tell who is a child," Lawrence Hussein, a senior official of the national registration bureau in the president's office, said.

"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," Hussien said.

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.



Labour Minister Davis Katsonga will officially issue the first certificates to scores of children in the southern district of Mwanza on Thursday.

Malawi, which lacks comprehensive child protection legislation, has been using a 1904 act which does not require citizens to be registered at birth nor report death to authorities.

Population experts say half of the country's 12 million citizens are children under 16.

In 2007, UNICEF launched a major new 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."

Officials at UNICEF in Malawi said the study would be used to build up the case for a comprehensive child protection legislation.