By Tendai Makaripe
At 35, Sibusisiwe Dube has never set foot in a classroom. Growing up without a birth certificate meant she was invisible to the state, and the chance to learn slipped through her fingers. Now, in Robert Sinyoka village, a peri-urban area in Bulawayo’s Ward 17, history is repeating itself.
None of her five children has a birth certificate either, and like their mother, they face the prospect of watching education pass them by.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Penhalonga, Betty’s story carries the same weight of loss.
Her parents migrated from Malawi to Zimbabwe before independence, but she has never been granted identity documents.
In 2017, when she tried to register her children at the Mutasa Registry, officials demanded her parents’ death certificates and even a personal appearance by the local headman.
In the end, they turned her away, telling her to seek documents in Malawi — a country she had never known.
The refusal sealed her son Tinashe’s fate.
At 17, instead of preparing for exams, he dropped out of school and now spends his days in the perilous tunnels of an informal mine.
“He should be in class,” Betty says.
“But because I don’t have documents, my children don’t either. It’s like we don’t exist.”
Their case is not unique but replayed in many parts of the country, reflecting a growing problem: children denied birth certificates are being locked out of school, healthcare and opportunity, their futures clipped before they begin.
For many, these delays are the first step toward statelessness, a condition that leaves children without nationality, recognition or the basic rights that come with belonging.
Globally, at least 10 million people are stateless, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Statelessness is sometimes described as an “invisible problem” because its victims are often unseen and unheard, living on the margins without the recognition of citizenship.
The consequences are severe: “Stateless people often aren’t allowed to go to school, see a doctor, get a job, open a bank account, buy a house or even get married”, says the UNHCR.
A major cause is the failure to secure birth registration.
“Lack of birth registration can put people at risk of statelessness as a birth certificate provides proof of where a person was born and parentage – key information needed to establish a nationality,” read a UNHCR 2024 report in part.
The United Nations Development Group warns that “statelessness can limit access to birth registration, identity documentation, as well as basic rights such as education, health care, legal employment, property ownership, political participation and freedom of movement”.
For children like Sibusisiwe’s and Betty’s, these abstract concepts have already become lived realities.
In Zimbabwe, the scale of the problem is growing.
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Defence, Home Affairs, Security Services and War Veterans (2024) estimated that 300,000 people are at risk of statelessness, including descendants of Malawian, Zambian and Mozambican migrants brought to work on farms and mines during the colonial period.
During public hearings, the Committee was told that children of single parents and those born out of wedlock face particularly steep barriers.
“In most cases, these parents either did not have primary documents themselves or they did not have the required documentation to obtain primary documents such as birth records for the children,” the report noted.
The situation was made worse by laws that prohibit fathers from registering their children without the mother’s presence, as well as regulations that force guardians to produce affidavits, witnesses, and letters from headmen to complete the registration process.
Although the Constitution guarantees every child the right to a name and a birth certificate under Section 81(1)(c), many fall through the cracks of bureaucracy and outdated legislation.
The human cost of delayed or denied birth registration is captured in stories like that of Flexen Siziba, a father of 11 from Gwanda.
His late wife had no identity documents, and when she died, her relatives refused to cooperate to help register the children. Today, none of his children has a birth certificate.
Flexen fears their futures are already sealed.
He told Amnesty International he worries they “will never get to high school or formal jobs” — a generation locked out of opportunity before it begins.
For Lulumani Maphosa from Bulilima, now 23, the problem began with tragedy.
She lost her birth records in a house fire in 2013.
When she approached the registry, officials refused to accept her uncle’s letter as proof of identity, demanding documents she did not have.
As a result, she failed to sit for her final school exams despite being a bright student.
“Life has been difficult and painful. I was brilliant at school, but I did not sit my final exams. Now I can’t get a decent job,” she said.
Worse still, her two-year-old daughter is also undocumented and risks inheriting her mother’s statelessness.
These stories underscore how the absence of a single document can reproduce cycles of exclusion across generations.
Zimbabwe is not alone in facing this challenge, but its situation stands in sharp relief against international standards.
The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”.
The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness requires states to prevent children from being born stateless and to include safeguards in their nationality laws.
While Zimbabwe has not fully aligned itself with these conventions, it is bound by broader obligations under treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obligates states to ensure every child is registered at birth.
International agencies argue that reform is urgent.
“Statelessness not only denies individuals their rights, but can significantly impair efforts to promote economic and social development,” notes the UNDG guidance on human rights.
In recent years, the government has intensified efforts to address the problem through nationwide mobile registration blitzes. Since mid-2023, the Civil Registry Department has dispatched mobile teams across rural and peri-urban areas, often basing them at schools, and has provided free birth certificates and IDs to more than a million people.
In February 2025, officials launched a 10-day blitz in peri-urban Bulawayo targeting orphaned and child-headed families, with 86 undocumented learners at one primary school registered in a single day.
Alongside these drives, the Statelessness Taskforce — formed in 2023 and comprising the Civil Registry, several ministries, the police and UNHCR — continues to meet quarterly and is working with ZIMSTAT on a long-delayed census-based analysis of stateless populations.
However, progress has stalled due to persistent funding shortages and bureaucratic delays, leaving many vulnerable families without documentation months after submitting their applications.
Civil society groups have pressed for reforms, including simplifying late registration, allowing fathers and guardians to register children in the absence of mothers, and scrapping onerous documentation rules.
In 2021, the High Court ordered the Registrar’s Office to allow fathers to obtain birth certificates for children born out of wedlock without the mother’s presence, but activists say legal gaps still leave women, guardians and children of migrant families exposed.
Globally, UNHCR’s #IBelong Campaign, first launched in 2014 to end statelessness by 2024, has since evolved into the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which now aligns with the Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring legal identity for all by 2030.
Zimbabwe’s path forward will require not only political will but also alignment with these global efforts.
Back in Bulawayo, Sibusisiwe wonders what kind of life awaits her children without the papers she never had.
In Penhalonga, Betty fears that Tinashe’s days in the mine are the first of many lost opportunities.
In Gwanda, Flexen watches his children drift away from the promise of schooling.
And in Bulilima, Lulumani still feels the sting of exams she could never sit for, as she worries her daughter may face the same fate.
These are not isolated tragedies. They are threads in a national crisis where bureaucracy, poverty, and outdated laws conspire to deny children the right to belong.
A birth certificate is a child’s first defence against a life of invisibility.
Without it, futures are stolen before they can even begin.
