Seen, Counted and Protected: A Six-Part Blog Series
This series draws on the webinar Seen, Counted and Protected, convened by Family for Every Child as part of the Children on the Move 2026 campaign. Six civil society organisations working across Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, Greece, the UK, and Colombia came together to share what identity rights look like in practice for children on the move. Each post in this series focuses on one organisation and one dimension of the problem.
Part 5 of 6: Guatemala | CONACMI
When a child is not registered with the State, they officially do not exist. Their family, neighbours and community may know them, but to the government, the school system and the health system, they simply do not exist.
In Guatemala, the under-registration of children is not a technical failure. It is the visible sign of a much older and more deeply rooted problem.
CONACMI has been working on this issue for years. What they describe is a system shaped by thirty-six years of internal armed conflict. That war, which ended in 1996, displaced mainly Indigenous communities from their lands. Women and children suffered the greatest consequences. And those consequences did not end with the peace accords.
Today, around 7% of Guatemalans — approximately 1.2 million people — remain internally displaced. Poverty is severe: 56% of the population lives in poverty and 16% in extreme poverty. A significant number of children also remain unregistered, not because families do not want to register them, but because the system systematically makes the process difficult.
The barriers families face
The barriers documented by CONACMI are complex and mutually reinforcing.
Families who go to municipal offices of the National Registry of Persons (RENAP) encounter a system in which the criteria and requirements for receiving services can vary from one visit to another and between different local offices. In some cases, officials also request more documents than the law requires. This creates uncertainty, delays and frustration and, as a result, can discourage families from continuing with the registration process.
Another problem identified is institutional racism, which particularly affects Indigenous families. Clothing, language, or difficulty communicating fluently in Spanish can become factors that influence the treatment people receive, rather than being recognised as aspects of cultural and linguistic diversity that should be taken into account in the provision of public services. When a person’s cultural or linguistic characteristics become an obstacle to accessing a service, existing inequalities are deepened and the effective exercise of the right to identity is restricted.
Territorial and economic conditions create further barriers. The location and accessibility of RENAP offices can make registration difficult for families who live far from them, particularly in rural areas. Families may have to travel long distances and cover additional transport costs and other expenses associated with the process. For families with limited incomes, these costs can become a genuine obstacle to completing registration on time.
Gender norms and practices also affect access to registration. In many families, responsibility for childcare and for completing procedures related to children continues to fall primarily on women, particularly mothers. However, when registration requires the participation or authorisation of the father and he is absent because of work, migration or other circumstances, the process can be delayed for months or even years. In this way, gender inequalities within families interact with administrative barriers and can contribute to prolonged under-registration.
When registration is not completed on time, families may also face additional costs associated with later procedures. For those who already struggled to meet the costs associated with initial registration, these expenses can represent a significant burden. The impact is not the same for every family: for households with sufficient income, it may be a manageable expense, while for large, low-income families living in remote areas, it may become a cost beyond their means.
Language is another significant barrier. In Guatemala, part of the population has an Indigenous language as their mother tongue and does not speak Spanish fluently, while Spanish remains the predominant language used in public services. This particularly affects Indigenous women, who also carry a significant share of childcare and parenting responsibilities. When registration processes are conducted mainly in Spanish and do not adequately take account of the country’s linguistic diversity, families can struggle to understand the requirements, procedures and steps needed to exercise their right to identity.
Finally, the barriers do not exist only within institutions. Community leaders, who could serve as trusted points of reference and help facilitate these processes, as they do in other areas, often do not have sufficient information about registration procedures. This limits their ability to guide and support people who are experiencing difficulties. Without recognised community leaders having the information and tools they need to provide this support, the existing gap will become even wider.
In conclusion, under-registration is a multi-causal social problem. It cannot be reduced simply to a failure to complete registration on time. Institutional, economic, territorial, linguistic, social and cultural barriers all converge. Together, they turn what should be a simple procedure into a bureaucratic, expensive, lengthy and difficult process.
What is the cost of invisibility?
The price paid for invisibility is ultimately incalculable.
When a child or adolescent is not registered, there is no legal basis for denying them access to State services, because the “best interests of the child” should take precedence as a fundamental principle. In practice, however, schools and health centres frequently refuse to enrol them in school or provide the vaccinations they need. This takes place in a Guatemalan context where successive governments have dismantled vaccination programmes, disproportionately affecting people experiencing the greatest levels of vulnerability.
Children and adolescents without birth registration may face greater difficulties in effectively accessing the systems and institutional mechanisms intended to protect their rights. In the Guatemalan context, which is marked by different forms of violence, trafficking and exploitation affecting children and adolescents, visibility to the State is an important condition for their identification, protection and follow-up.
A lack of registration does not in itself remove their rights, but it can weaken this layer of protection. It can make it more difficult for institutions to identify them, include them in their systems and activate protection mechanisms promptly when their rights are violated.
Birth registration as a political act and an affirmation of origins
The most striking case shared by CONACMI comes from the Panzós area, one of the regions most affected by the armed conflict.
Families displaced from their ancestral lands returned twelve years ago, reclaiming territory that is now also claimed by a palm oil company. Since then, children have been born in the community. The National Registry of Persons has strategically refused, in favour of the company, to register them, citing the absence of a legal address and proposing that families give the children another address instead.
The law does not require the kind of legal address being demanded by RENAP. It requires people to be registered in their current place of residence.
The refusal has a political logic: registering the children would, in some sense, mean recognising the presence of the community on disputed territory. As a result, children born in this region in 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2020 exist for their families and their community, but not for the Guatemalan State.
How CONACMI responds
CONACMI works at three levels.
First, it directly covers the cost of late registration, paying the fines and fees that prevent families from completing the process. This also includes the costs of RENAP mobile registration sessions within communities.
Second, it provides accompaniment and political support in individual cases throughout the process, particularly when families face additional difficulties, such as when parents themselves are not registered.
Third, it trains community leaders, strengthening their knowledge of how to navigate the system so that this capacity remains within communities beyond the involvement of any particular organisation.
None of this changes the structural problem. What it does is reduce the harm the system causes, case by case, while advocacy continues at political, national and international levels.
Every child who is not registered begins life without legal recognition of their existence. In Guatemala, this is not simply a lack of documentation, but often a political decision to leave certain children invisible.
This is part 5 of a six-part series.
Family for Every Child's Children on the Move 2026 campaign runs from 15 to 21 June. Find out more about the campaign and join the conversation.
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