LifeStart: Strengthening systems to improve early birth registration and early receipt of the Child Support Grant

The Child Support Grant (CSG) is an unconditional cash transfer for children living in extreme poverty. It is government’s primary programme for alleviating child poverty and has been highly successful in its reach and impact. Children who receive the CSG early, before age two, show better health, nutrition and education outcomes.

But the CSG reaches fewer and fewer infants every year. For millions of eligible children these benefits are lost. The most common barrier to early access of the CSG is that parents do not have identity documents for themselves or birth certificates for their children.

Children without birth certificates are not only excluded from the CSG but also essential services like early childhood development programmes, healthcare, and schooling. Improving early registration of birth has a multiplier effect for improving many child wellbeing outcomes. 

What we are doing to effect change

To improve early birth registration and early receipt of the CSG, the Children's Institute  developed the LifeStart project in 2024. We are partnering with multiple government departments on this project to:

• Build an evidence base on the challenges and opportunities, including quantifying the exclusions;
• Strengthen service delivery systems that are at scale. 
• Evaluate current system innovations that can be scaled; and
• Monitor pilot innovations that could streamline and integrate systems for maternal and child health, birth registration and grants. 

The change we want to see

• Stronger integration of government services to promote uptake of birth registration and social grants at scale, from infancy.
• Interdepartmental strategies to identify and resolve cases where infants are at risk of exclusion.
• An increase in the number of babies registered within 30 days of birth.
• An increase in the number of infants benefitting from the CSG.