By Ha Chu | MSD Event and Communication Officer
N.H.T.V was among the children who had their birth registered by the New Life Page Project. Just as hundreds of children we approached did, Vy used to live in the shadow and her very citizenship was not recognized by the law.
No sooner had her mother given birth to her than she left without registering her a birth certificate. T.V was brought up by her dad and grandmother in Saigon, enduring all hardship and poverty a poor child could. Her dad earns a living as a street bicycle mechanic, who makes bicycle repairs for cyclists passing by. He travels everyday by a shabby bicycle with an old toolbox- everything the poor man possess to feed the family.
Her dad had tried and failed to get his daughter a birth certificate for lacking required documents. To make the matter worse, he was unable to prove his paternal relationship with T.V without the presence of her mother, and could not afford an AND test while lacking any alternatives to validate her birth, etc. In the end, birth registration of T.V was suspended over and again. Miseries befell the impoverished family when Vy fell ill without having health insurance.
In November 2019, while playing in front of the alley, she was crashed by a motorbike that immediately ran away after the incident. The terrible crash broke her left arm and shoulder bones, resulting in serious injuries when she was only a five-year-old child.
Not having a birth certificate means she could not apply for health insurance which would have covered part of the treatment, her father and grandfather had to knock on doors after doors in search of help. As luck would have it, T.V’s father and grandmother had before filed an application to the Centre of Legal Aid, requesting birth registration support for her. And the Center made contact with New Life Page Project about her case.
After being informed about her critical situation, Lawyer Dat decided to speed up her birth registration by getting T.V and Mr. Vu, her father an AND test with the cost being covered by New Life Page Project. Just as having a birth certificate and health insurance, the fees for her treatment were partly lifted. Bursting into tears, her grandmother confessed “With a birth certificate, my granddaughter can be admitted to school now.”
T.V was just one of many children who was registered by the project. Without a birth certificate, a lot of school-age children cannot attend school, meaning their window into the future remains closed. New Life Page Project aims to grant children the opportunities to have their names recognized and we believe every child in Vietnam has the right to be registered as well as enjoy other rights enshrined in Law on Children and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
From 2014 - 2019, the project helped 110 cases to obtain a birth certificate. In 2019-2020, with the support of the Justice Initiatives Facilitation Fund (JIFF), the project strengthens cooperation with the Department of Justice of Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City Legal Aid Center to accelerate and increasing the scale of support, currently, the project has supported an additional 65 cases andplan to solve 50-60 other cases.
For further details, please visit Facebook Page “A New Life Page”: https://www.facebook.com/Duantrangmoicuocdoi/
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
