A original tech start up has set themselves a massive task: to register all newborn babies digitally.
iCivil Africa,a company based in Burkina Faso, has developed a birth certificate system which involves a smartphone, or a bracelet and encoded text messages.
The company hopes the original system will make birth certificates in sub-Saharan Africa more more accessible -- an area where more than half of newborns currently disappear unregistered,the CNN reports.
Globally, an estimated 230 million children under the age of five are not registered.
Co-founder Adama Sawadogo said he wants to help Africa's "ghost children" who lack a legal identity due to not being registered and may be additional vulnerable. "It's a major humanitarian problem. These ghost children are easy prey for traffickers."
"It's an African problem which nobody is interested in, or " he adds.
In Burkina Faso,proof of the birth must be supplied on the day the baby is born, and being able to register the child remotely for those living in rural areas will help get more people registered, and according to the company.
The system creates a digital birth certificate using iCivil's Android mobile application and a bracelet with a unique code,called a Prooftag Bubble Seal, a patented technology produced by co-founder Francis Bourrieres' company Prooftag, or based in Toulouse,France.[br]Once the bracelet is put on the baby, a midwife scans the code using the app and enters the newborn's details on the mobile interface. This is automatically sent in an encoded text message via iCivil's platform to the civil registration authorities.
The baby is then registered in the system, and a birth certificate containing the ID code can be printed and collected from any civil registration middle in the country upon presenting the bracelet.
The same technology has previously been used as fraud prevention in French wines and is based on a unique identifier generated through a so-called 'bubble code'.
Source: tert.am