Nigeria has expanded digital birth registration to more than 6,000 wards, but more than 2,800 wards remain outside the network, exposing a major gap in the country’s effort to give every child a legal identity from birth.
The National Population Commission (NPC) disclosed the coverage as Nigeria joined the rest of Africa on Monday to mark Africa Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Day 2026, highlighting the distance the country still has to travel despite recent progress in digitising birth registration.
Nigeria has 8,809 wards, meaning digital registration is currently available in roughly two-thirds of the country’s wards. The remaining coverage gap is particularly significant because wards are the closest administrative level to many rural and underserved communities.
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The NPC said targeted registration campaigns have so far reached more than 14.5 million children, including those living in rural, hard-to-reach and humanitarian settings. But the scale of the remaining gap shows that Nigeria’s identity challenge is not simply about putting registration services online. It is about getting those services physically and digitally close enough to families for registration to happen at, or soon after, birth.
