Invisible Crisis: 100,000 Unregistered Moroccan Children Lack Access to Basic Services

There are some 100,000 children in this case, the Spanish agency EFE reports. According to Mustafa Ramid, Minister of State for Human Rights, last year 91,474 unregistered children had been identified. Figures that should be revised upwards, given that there are still unidentified children, not to mention that there are also adults in administrative limbo, notes Abdellah Soussi, president of the Amane Foundation for the Protection of Children.

According to A. Soussi, a third of unregistered children come from the Rabat, Salé and Kénitra region. "Wherever there is social vulnerability, there will be many unregistered children," he lamented. The "perfect candidates" to end up off the register are children born of Koranic marriages, children of single mothers, those born after a rape or children from a family in extreme poverty.

The plea of the NGOs working in the field of child protection is for a simplification of administrative procedures to speed up the registration of children.

The Moroccan government launched a first campaign in 2017 which, in December 2018, succeeded in registering 53,418 children in the civil registry. Covid-19 and confinement marked a halt to the new national campaign for the registration of children in the civil registry launched in April 2019, at the same time as a joint ministerial committee and regional commissions, indicates the same source.