Chad: N'Djamena digitizes its civil registry, 623,000 children remain without birth certificates

The N'Djamena municipality launched the digitization of its civil registry records on September 23, 2026, by signing a memorandum of understanding with the National Agency for Secure Titles (ANATS), with the support of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF). The mayor of the Chadian capital, Senoussi Hassana Abdoulaye, the director general of ANATS, Youssouf Gorou Tchaby, and the OIF representative, Hans de Marie Heumgoup, formalized the project, reports Alwihda Info.

The stated objective is to digitize and safeguard existing paper records, create an integrated management platform for certificates, and interconnect the municipal civil registry with the Integrated Population and Secure Titles Management System (SIGPTS), specifies the specialized media outlet We Are Tech Africa. The project also includes training for staff and awareness campaigns for residents.

Without papers, no school or healthcare

The initiative addresses a documented shortfall. According to the 2023 census cited by We Are Tech Africa, 623,000 school-aged Chadian children do not have a birth certificate. Without this primary document, a child struggles to register for exams, obtain an identity card, open a bank account, or claim an inheritance: the absence of civil status is not just an administrative detail, it is an exclusion that is passed down.

A previous operation conducted in 2024 and 2025 in the Tandjilé and Ennedi East provinces helped regularize 53,000 children, according to the same source. Across its network, the OIF states that it has contributed to the registration of more than 600,000 people since 2020 in ten member states and to the training of more than 10,000 civil registry officers.

Archives to be protected

"Better preserve our archives, better secure our data," summarized the mayor of N'Djamena, as quoted by Alwihda Info. The director general of ANATS, for his part, recalled that "the modernization of the civil registry is a collective responsibility." In a country where records often remain handwritten and vulnerable to both floods and fires, digital preservation serves as insurance against the total loss of families' administrative history.

Questions remain that the launch does not resolve: the deployment schedule, the cost, and the protection of personal data in a database that will eventually record the identities of millions of Chadians. Success will be measured less by the number of records scanned than by the number of children who finally obtain a birth certificate.