How Blockchain Improves Birth, Death, and Marriage Registration

Article 7 of “The 1989 Convention on the Rights of a Child” of the UN General Assembly states that a “child shall be registered immediately after birth…” Yet, many nations still lag behind in terms of birth certification.

For example, in India, only 41% of newborns receive a birth certificate. In Tanzania, a birth certificate is necessary for university enrollment, yet more than 30% of the country’s people lack proper birth registration. In Sudan, you need a birth certificate to attend school. However, 20% of the nation’s children remain unregistered.

Identification is necessary for an adequate livelihood. It is required for a multitude of government services throughout the world. Implementing birth registration through blockchain brings many advantages. Besides cutting costs and optimizing the registration process, it also increases education rates around the world.

Why Birth Certificates Are So Important

In essence, birth certificates are the documentation that proves our existence. Just imagine: 51 million children around the globe are unregistered at birth annually.

Without birth certificates, we are practically invisible. As a result, the term “invisible children” has been coined to represent children who remain birth certificate-less, which means that these children cannot travel. In most cases, they cannot attend school, definitely not a university, and they are cut off from the services necessary to lead a fulfilling life.

How Blockchain Is Helping India

Despite being a part of the convention for children’s rights, India has had a problem with birth registration. This has led to many problems in the country, including many children not receiving proper care. It is estimated that college attendance rates in India could double for that reason.

Due to these alarming facts, India has to implement better practices when dealing with birth certificates and child registration, using blockchain to push registration rates further.

Lynked.World is a digital identity management platform powered by blockchain. The project’s ultimate goal is to verify identity through a simple QR code scan. Local governments throughout India have begun adopting the use of Lynked.World for new births in the region.

An increase in birth certificates could bring a variety of valuable changes; primarily, people would finally get an identity.

Birth certificates are necessary to attend most college institutions. Therefore, their increase would spread education across the globe, especially in third-world countries, where birth registration is considerably low.

Bringing better identification methods with blockchain would end outdated practices and provide billions of people throughout the world with better opportunities and a higher quality of life.

How Blockchain Optimizes Marriage Registration

Almost as important as birth certificates, marriage certificates are being impacted by blockchain as well. Current certificates require a vast amount of documentation. Paper-based documentation is prone to human error and fraud. These issues often slow down the certification process. By putting these forms on the blockchain and automating them, the whole marriage certification can be conducted in a matter of minutes rather than months.

Bitnation, a blockchain-based project geared towards the financial industry, is now used for marriage certification. Their “Smart Love” is the world’s first blockchain-powered marriage service, which provides a simpler registration for marriages.

This same technology can be implemented toward divorce certificates, too. Divorce registration rates are alarming throughout the world and are also in desperate need of optimization — for instance, in the U.S., divorce rate hovers between 40 to 50%.

Death Certificates and Will Registration: How Blockchain Eases the Pain

Loss of a loved one is one of the hardest times in every person’s life. Unfortunately, this process also involves large amounts of paperwork, including wills, death certificates, and other documents.

Blockchain technology could make the process of death much easier to deal with, considering that electronic estate planning, electronic health records, real estate, and funeral donations can all be simplified with blockchain.

MyClinic.com is a project whose goal is to place health records on the blockchain. When a death occurs, this makes it much easier for doctors, lawyers, or any other necessary agents attending the death and burial process, to access the deceased’s health records.

Additionally to health-related record-keeping, blockchain is revolutionizing the estate data records as well. Contract Vault is putting last wills on the blockchain. A will based on the blockchain goes far beyond a simple optimization and saves possible legal costs along the way, involving debates over the validity of a particular document.

Making the Invisible Visible Again With Blockchain

Blockchain can bring changes that have far too long been overdue. Whether it be establishing birth certificates in places like India so children can go to school, or easing the burden of death and will registration by safely storing valuable health and estate information, blockchain will play a vital role in shaping the world of tomorrow.

Additionally to all the improvements blockchain is already bringing to the medical, financial, and banking industries, this technology will bring even more to the record-keeping sphere, making the lives of people throughout the world a lot easier and more fulfilled.