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.
Nepal is a disaster-prone country. Earthquakes, landslides, and flooding displace communities with regularity. Climate change is making this worse. And when a family is displaced by a disaster, they often lose more than their home. They lose the documents that prove who they are.
Voice of Children (VOC) works in Nepal with children who are street-connected, separated from families, survivors of sexual abuse, or in some other way disconnected from the protection systems around them. They focus particularly on families living in slum and squatter areas, and migrant families in urban settings. What they encounter consistently is the weight of living without legal identity.
The scale of the problem
Nepal’s government estimates around one million children without birth registration. Between 4.5 and 6 million Nepalis do not have a citizenship certificate. These are not small numbers, and the causes are not simple.
Some families lose documents in disasters and cannot recover them through a system that has not fully developed electronic or online records. Some fathers leave for work or migration and do not return, leaving mothers unable to complete registration processes that require both parents’ involvement. Children with disabilities may not be recognised by family members in ways that allow registration to proceed. Refugees from Bhutan, Bangladesh, and India living in Nepal face an additional layer: governments that are not willing to issue them national identity documents in the first place.
Political willingness runs through this at every level. Local leaders are often required to recommend applicants for identity documents. In communities where those leaders discriminate, that recommendation simply does not come. Bureaucrats who know there are loopholes in the system sometimes use them as cover for inaction, reasoning that if they issue documents they might face some legal complication later. And so they do nothing, and children remain invisible to the state.
What it means in practice
Without identity documents, children in Nepal cannot reliably access government healthcare services or education. They cannot receive social protection payments or benefits. They cannot, as they grow older, open a bank account or register a SIM card. They cannot vote. They cannot travel formally.
Raju Ghimire from Voice of Children was direct about the downstream risks. Children without legal identity face higher vulnerability to abuse, exploitation, child labour, trafficking, and early marriage. Visibility to the state is not a sufficient protection against these harms, but its absence removes an important layer. A child who does not exist on any official record is a child for whom no system is watching.
The specific weight of climate displacement
One month before the webinar where Voice of Children spoke, the Kathmandu Valley government had cleared a slum area. Families were removed. In the process, many lost their identity documents. Voice of Children and other child rights agencies raised the issue with the authorities. But the families affected were already among the most marginalised: people whose hold on documentation was fragile before the clearance and who, after it, had nothing.
This is the particular cruelty of climate and disaster displacement. It strips people of what little security they had. And when that security includes a physical identity document stored in a home that no longer exists, rebuilding it requires navigating the very systems that have historically been hostile to these communities.
What Voice of Children does
Voice of Children combines direct case support with community awareness and advocacy. When a family has lost documents or never had them, the organisation helps them understand what they need, links them to local government, and accompanies them through the process. For those who cannot physically attend registration offices, such as people with significant disabilities, they coordinate with organisations that can provide additional support.
Their youth-led campaign on identity rights runs awareness work in communities, aiming to build knowledge before the crisis rather than only responding after it. In 2025, around fifteen children and young people secured birth certificates and citizenship cards through Voice of Children’s support.
That number is small against the scale of the problem. But each of those fifteen children is no longer invisible.
This is part 2 of a six-part series.
Family for Every Child’s Children on the Move 2026 campaign runs from 15 to 21 June. Join the conversation on Changemakers for Children.
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The organisations in this series are leading change from within their own communities, drawing on lived experience and deep local knowledge to improve the lives of children and families.
Family for Every Child connects and amplifies this expertise across borders, turning local solutions into shared learning and global influence so that a breakthrough in Guatemala strengthens practice in Nepal, and what children in Colombia are teaching us reaches the rooms where global policy is made.
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