Population Registers, Ethics and Human Rights

Digital innovations are often promising improvements to civil registration and national identity management systems. In practice, poor design and implementation, inadequate policy and mismanagement can trigger exclusion and pose serious new risks for vulnerable subpopulations. Efforts to explore and address these ethical and human rights challenges are often siloed because of disciplinary boundaries that make it difficult to simultaneously integrate perspectives from, for example, law, public policy, demography, and public health.

Despite strong interest and activity on the part of young scholars and activists in low- and middle-income countries to study and address these issues, current global policy efforts do not prioritize opportunities for them to contribute to shaping and improving efforts in this area. Strengthening the inclusion of young researchers and practitioners from low-middle-income countries is key to improving the quality, efficacy and sustainability of interdisciplinary efforts to address the challenges of digitized population data systems.

This webinar will explore how law, history and policy have shaped the inclusiveness of birth registration in South Africa, Brazil and Uganda; how the design and implementation of digitized voter registration systems in Cameroon can both be a force for inclusive and mechanism of exclusion; and how the accessibility of population register systems varies for different vulnerable subpopulations.

The webinar showcases individual fellow research projects and a collaborative group project being undertaken through the IUSSP Initiative on Population Registers, Ethics and Human Rights. This initiative infuses interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing on perspectives from law, history, economics, public policy, demography, and public health, to address the ethical and human rights challenges that are emerging as population register systems are rapidly digitized.

The webinar will begin with a brief overview of this initiative, followed by lightning talks from three IUSSP Population, Ethics and Human Rights Fellows, and a brief overview of the group project. This will be an open forum for attendees to engage in a meaningful discourse on the promises and perils of digitized population registers in settings as diverse as Brazil, Cameroon, Uganda and South Africa, posing questions, offering insights and advancing scholar-practitioner debate. This webinar is co-hosted by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, the UNFPA Centre of Excellence for CRVS Systems and the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Population Registers, Ethics and Human Rights.

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