120. The GoSL recognizes that there are still too many births of children that have not been registered. Based on UNICEF’s 2013 data, the number is as high as 1,3 million. In addition, a number of birth registration records are incomplete, largely as a result of a legislative measure introduced to overcome a customary barrier to birth registration. In Sierra Leone, as in a many other African countries, cultural practices often mean that children are only named months after they are born. In a bid to ensure that this does not prevent the registration of their births, the Births and Deaths Registration Act permits the registration of a child’s birth without a name. The challenge is that once registered, there is a low rate of amendment of the issued certificate to reflect the child’s name once given (Insight, 2013 draft ). 121. Factors that contribute low registration rates include lack of awareness by parents of their duty to register and of the importance of birth registration (especially in rural areas); difficulty of access to service sites; the lack of incentives for registration (mainly that a birth certificate is not required for school attendance or access to health); the destruction of records during the civil war; and the costs associated with registration (Seurat, 2013). In addition, limited human resource capacity, lack of infrastructure, limited transport and lack of registration materials (such as certificates) at national and district level hamper the registration process. 122. There is currently no electronic and / or centralised collection and management of the births registered. Data, which is manually recorded, remains at a local level. There is no centralised collection of the data at national level and there is very limited coordination between the national Civil Registry process and the birth registration process. 123. Over the years, the GoSL has taken a number of steps to improve birth registration rates, including training of officials and multi-partner outreach campaigns aimed at raising awareness and mobilizing communities and parents to support birth registration. These involved various partners such as the MSWGCA, traditional and religious leaders and civil society. 124. However, more recently, the GoSL has sought to improve the situation through a more systemic approach to the issue of birth registration. With the support of UNICEF, it undertook an assessment of the Birth Registration System in 2010. The resultant findings and recommendations informed the development of a revised three year strategic plan (2012-2015). The plan makes provision for strengthening systems, resources, legislation and practices, capacity and understanding of officials (especially at a decentralised level), for increasing awareness of the importance of and how to register a child’s birth, and for increasing financial and technical support to civil society partners to enable their effective support of the campaign. A National Task Force for Births and Deaths, an interagency body led by the MoHS was established in 2013 to implement the plan. 125. The choice of the PHC system as a core birth registration delivery vehicle means a widely and locally dispersed service delivery footprint as it currently reaches 94 percent of the targeted audience (infants, young children and their parents) through child health programmes such as the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI). The GoSL is exploring, with the support of UNICEF and PLAN, how to better integrate birth registration services into the EPI and other near-universal primary child health services. 40  Government of the Republic of Sierra Leone Initial Report on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child 2002-2014