What do you need to have while applying for a Kenyan birth certificate?

My understanding is that you only need to have the birth notification, mothers and father’s ID cards when applying for a Kenyan birth certificate. These at least are the requirements if you are applying for an infant’s/small child's Kenyan birth certificate. But if what you are applying for is a Kenyan birth certificate for an adult, then the requirements would probably have to be different.

In most cases, getting the birth notification and mother’s ID tends to be easy enough. That is unless the mother happens to be underage, and therefore not in possession of an ID card. Or if the mothers happens to be one of those people who attained the age of 18 but never bothered to apply forID cards. Where the child has been born in a marriage setting, getting the father’s ID is not difficult either. It is just a question of telling him ‘baba nanii, give me your ID card so that I can apply for nanii’s birth certificate’. Easy peasy. It should actually be easier than applying for a cooperative bank of Kenya loan. Problems tend to arise if the child’s parents are unmarried, and more so if the alleged father is doubtful of the kid’s paternity or if he just wants to run away from parental responsibility. In such cases, getting him to submit his ID for birth certificate issuance purposes can prove to a big challenge. And the law seems to be such that you actually need to show the father’s ID if you want him to be indicated as the father on the birth certificate. There have been alleged cases of people having to settle for Kenya single parent birth certificates on account of being unable to obtain their partners’ ID cards. Yet the requirement for the father's ID card here can’t be faulted: for if women were to be allowed to just orally state the names of the men they want included in their kids’ birth certificates, that would be akin to opening a pandora’s box. You would end up with men being named as fathers of kids they didn’t sire.

All in all, nowadays, the birth certificate has become a very important document in Kenya. Therefore, if you have a newly born child, it is very important for you to ensure that he or she gets a birth certificate as soon as possible. As hinted earlier in this article, the process of applying for a Kenyan birth certificate tends to be much easier if done during infancy. The people who helped you with the delivery of the child should be in a position to give you at least basic advice on birth certificate application. Alternatively, you can proceed to the local chief’s office and get advice from there on how to obtain a birth certificate for your new born kid. You have to understand that it is only through the birth notification and subsequently through the birth certificate that your kid’s existence gets into the government’s records. Your kid may have difficulties enrolling for school, registering for national exams, obtaining an ID card and a passport later on if you don’t get him properly registered (through a birth certificate) in the infancy. So it is important to spare a few hours for your kid's birth certificate application at the earliest opportunity.