Late Registration of Births Backlog

On 19 May 2023, the then-Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, acknowledged to Parliament that between 2018 and 2022, a backlog of undecided late registration of birth (LRB) applications had accumulated. LRB applications are applications for birth registration that are lodged after the child is 30 days old. In December 2022, Home Affairs had 258 000 undecided LRB applications, primarily children under the age of 18 years. The applicants were waiting for Home Affairs to process their applications and then issue their birth certificates. Most had been waiting for years.

During 2023 and 2024 the Children’s Institute (University of Cape Town) and the Legal Resources Centre sent three letters to the Minister and Department of Home Affairs (DHA) detailing cases of children whose LRB applications were stuck in the backlog and requested urgent intervention for these children and others also stuck in the backlog. No response was received to any of the letters.

In December 2024, the Children’s Institute and a group of parents, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, launched litigation in the Western Cape High Court against Home Affairs. The litigation is aimed at compelling Home Affairs to:

1. decide the applications of the 19 children and one adult involved in the court case and issue their birth certificates if approved;
2. diagnose the systemic inefficiencies that resulted in the applicants and their children and over a quarter of a million other children waiting many years for decisions on their registration of birth applications; and
3. draft a plan to ensure that present and future LRB applications are decided without long delays.

After an initial five-month long delay by Home Affairs in responding to the litigation, all papers have been filed, and the case is set down for a hearing on 10 June 2026.

This briefing note provides details of the litigation to date and the key debates emerging from the court papers.

The parents and children involved in the court case

The parents involved in the case are primarily mothers, while others are fathers, relatives, foster parents and prospective adoptive parents. They had all submitted applications to Home Affairs for the late registration of their children’s births (and in two instances for their own births).

Despite submitting all the necessary documents and complying with the provisions of the Births and Deaths Registration Act and its Regulations, they were forced to wait for between two and seven years for Home Affairs to decide their applications. They followed up multiple times over the years, paying high transport costs and repeatedly providing their contact details – only to be told to go home and wait for a call for an interview.

In late May 2026, when national Home Affairs belatedly became aware of the High Court case, the local offices started processing the applications of the parents and children directly involved in the case. After officials had assessed and verified the applications, they held interviews for each family. Concerningly, most of the interviews focussed on coercing mothers, in the presence of their children, to admit to being negligent because they applied late for their child’s birth registration. By September, all 19 of the children’s birth certificates had been issued and one of the adults. Only one adult remained without her birth certificate.

In the meantime, we have been contacted by a growing list of parents and their children who were also stuck in the backlog. We collated lists of these families and submitted the lists to the State Attorney managing the case in the hope that this will result in Home Affairs finalising the children’s cases. We have not yet received a formal response to these lists but have seen that some of these children’s cases have since started receiving attention at the local offices.

Severe consequences for the constitutional rights of children

The detailed affidavits of parents in our court case highlight the real consequences of the unreasonable delays caused by inefficiencies within Home Affairs. These include children being:

• denied public healthcare services and private medical aid,
• refused enrolment in early learning programmes and school,
• asked to leave their schools,
• forced to attend schools far from home incurring high transport costs,
• excluded from participating in school and club sporting matches, and
• excluded from school outings.

Parents and caregivers also reported:

• being refused social grants for their children’s basic needs, or if they did manage to get a grant, it was often suspended or cancelled by SASSA due to the child not having a birth certificate;
• that their child’s adoption could not be finalised; and
• being refused assistance from the Maintenance Court to claim financial support from the child’s other parent.

Why services for late registration of birth should be improved

The Births and Deaths Registration Act requires parents to register their child’s birth within 30 days of the baby being born. For babies not registered within 30 days, the Act allows for late registration of birth by parents, relatives or social workers, with additional proof being required for children aged one year and older. Registrations before the baby is one year old are generally easier – however for children older than one year of age, the process can be difficult to navoigate and likely to take a long time. Besides additional proof being required, LRB applications are generally discouraged by Home Affairs and not prioritised at a political level. However, there are many valid reasons why some parents do not register their babies early:

• Some parents do not know about the 30-day registration requirement;
• Some parents in rural areas cannot afford the high cost of transport to a Home Affairs office;
• The cultural practices of some families require mothers and babies to remain at home for up to three months following birth and/or to name the baby only after consultations with extended family;
• If a mother passes away during or immediately after childbirth, the child cannot be registered until the mother’s death certificate has been finalised. If the father is not married to the deceased mother, he is generally not allowed to register the baby;
• Newborn babies and mothers who are transferred to tertiary healthcare facilities due to health complications may spend their first 30 days in a hospital without a Home Affairs desk;
• Mothers suffering from post-natal depression can struggle to meet their parental responsibilities, including birth registration;
• Mothers with blocked IDs were not allowed to register their babies until 2024, when a High Court order prohibited DHA from preventing birth registration in such cases;
• Newborn babies abandoned by their mothers need social worker investigations and children’s court orders to be registered, which takes at least 90 days;
• Older children without birth certificates, who were abandoned by their mothers, also need court orders to be registered. The relatives caring for them are dependent on social workers to obtain the court orders.

The most common reason we encounter for babies not being registered within 30 days is because their mother did not have an ID when giving birth. There are multiple reasons why a mother may not have an ID when she gives birth:

• Many young women who were orphaned or abandoned by their parents cannot obtain their IDs due to Home Affairs requiring first time ID applicants to be accompanied by their parents. Women born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at the height of the HIV pandemic when maternal orphaning was at its peak, are most affected by this challenge.
• Mothers aged between 16 and 19 years, who have dropped out of school or fallen pregnant while still schooling, are more likely to miss opportunities provided by the school environment for ID applications.
• If a young mom is under the age of 16 when she gives birth, she is not yet eligible to apply for her ID. Some Home Affairs officials are aware that moms under 16 can use their birth certificates to register their babies if they have an adult family member with them, but many officials are not aware of this option.

What is the size of the backlog?

December 2022 – the original backlog: On 19 May 2023 the then-Minister, Motsoaledi, acknowledged to Parliament that between 2018 and 2022, a backlog of LRB applications had accumulated. It amounted to a quarter of a million children (258 000) as at December 2022. We call this figure the ‘original’ backlog.

June 2025 – Deputy Minister reports the backlog as 33 000 applications: On 19 June 2025 in response to media reports on the court case, the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs said in a TV news interview that the figure of “250 000 was actually an estimate”  and that it was drawn from “historical data”. He said the backlog was at 33 000 applications and that this was a small number in comparison to the high number of birth registrations that Home Affairs finalises every year.

October 2025 – Home Affairs DG reports to the High Court that the backlog stands at 33 386: On 20 October 2025, Home Affairs filed its Answering Affidavit and attached a presentation dated June 2025 that reported the backlog of “LRBs on hand” as 33 386 as of 31 May 2025.

November 2025 – Children’s Institute submits that the ‘current’ backlog is likely 240 000: On 14 November 2025 the Children’s Institute filed its Replying Affidavit which included a supporting affidavit by a statistical expert that analysed the number of LRBs approved in 2023 and 2024 (as published by Stats SA) to test the validity of Home Affairs backlog figure of 33 386. This analysis found that the ‘original backlog’ could only have been reduced to 140 000 by the end of 2024 and that due to more applications being lodged in 2023 and 2024, a further 100 000 LRB undecided applications had been added, bringing the backlog to over 240 000 undecided LRB applications at the end of 2024.

The Children’s Institute also filed affidavits from staff members and clients who had visited two Home Affairs offices in the Cape Metro in late 2025 and had been informed by the officials working on the LRB applications in these offices that these two offices together had approximately 2500 LRB applications on their desks. This contradicted the DG’s Answering Affidavit which alleged that there we only 297 ‘LRBs on hand’ in the whole of the Western Cape.

February 2026 – Minister Leon Schrieber reports to Parliament that the backlog is still at 33 386: On 12 February 2026, the Minister answered a Parliamentary question on the LRB backlog and he repeated the same figure of 33 386 that was first reported in June 2025, nine months previously.

What does ‘LRBs on hand’ mean?

It is not clear what Home Affairs is counting when it reports on its LRB backlog:

• Does the figure of 33 386 ‘LRBs on hand’ refer to LRB applications that remain undecided from the original backlog of 258 000 as at December 2022? If yes, why is Home Affairs not reporting on undecided LRB applications that were lodged since January 2023 to date?
• Or does the figure of 33 386 refer to all undecided LRB applications currently sitting in paper folders in local DHA offices? If yes, why has the number remained the same between 31 May 2025 and 12 February 2026? Does this mean there has been no progress in reducing the backlog in these nine months? Or that Home Affairs has not done a physical stock take since 31 May 2025?
• Or does the figure of 33 386 “LRBs on hand” refer only to those applications that have been verified and scheduled for interviews, excluding all the other LRB applications that have been submitted by parents but not yet assessed or verified by Home Affairs officials?

What should be counted as “in the backlog”?

All LRB applications submitted to Home Affairs and not decided within six months should be considered to be “in the backlog”. This is because DHA has set its own timeframe of 180 days (6 months) in its Standard Operating Procedure for deciding LRBs for individuals aged 15 and older. There is no timeframe set for deciding LRBs for children aged younger than 15 years. However, because younger children are more vulnerable, it can be assumed that the timeframe would not be longer than the timeframe set for older children and adults.

Besides the 258 000 in the backlog in December 2022 that remain undecided to date, anyone who has lodged a LRB application since 1 January 2023 and who has been waiting for more than six months should be counted as falling within the LRB backlog. We estimate this figure to be 240 000 at the end of 2024. This does not include applications submitted since January 2025 and therefore under-estimates the current backlog.

Paper based system in a time of digital transformation

LRB applications are lodged at local offices on paper application forms and stored in paper folders. There appears to be no electronic register to enable tracking of the national or provincial numbers, and no electronic system for storing copies of the precious supporting documents that applicants have spent money and time on collecting. These supporting documents include original copies of Proof of
Birth Forms signed and stamped by Health Care Facilities where the child was born and signed and stamped school letters and admission registers from the school that the child attended for Grade 1. This paper-based system makes undecided LRB applications invisible to the national office unless a physical stock take is done at every local office. There are over 300 Home Affairs offices around the country.

Paper files are also more susceptible to loss, neglect and fraud.  In August 2025, the files of two of our clients^[1] were destroyed in the fire at the Germiston Home Affairs office.^[2] One client, a mother of two unregistered children, had been waiting for a year and a half for her own LRB application to be decided. Since the fire she has had to lodge a new application and start the wait again.

Another of our clients, Zanele (pseudonym), a 16-year-old orphan living with her aunt had already been waiting two and a half years since her LRB was lodged. Her interview had been conducted successfully in late 2024 and Home Affairs Germiston said in July 2025 that it was waiting on Pretoria to verify her fingerprints. After Zanele’s LRB file was burnt in the fire in August 2025, she was told she will have to re-apply. In April 2026, SASSA stopped paying Zanele’s CSG Top-Up and stopped paying her aunt’s Old Age Pension. SASSA is demanding that her aunt provide Zanele’s birth certificate before they will reinstate her Old Age Pension and CSG Top-Up. SASSA appears to be either unaware of the backlog in LRBs or does not have a system to protect people in the LRB backlog from its automated review system that red flags anyone without an ID or a birth certificate – including orphaned and abandoned children and the grannies caring for them.

Causes of the backlog

From the experiences of our clients, it appears that much of the backlog can be ascribed to:

• Applications sitting in paper piles at local offices for many years before they are opened and processed for verification.
• Unreasonably long delays by Home Affairs in verifying the supporting documents of applicants (the proof of birth form and evidence of school attendance).
• The insistence by Home Affairs on conducting interviews for all applications for LRB despite this not being required by the law or by Home Affairs own policy.
• Interview panels consist of five officials including several senior officials needed for day-to-day services at local offices, meaning that interview panels do not meet often enough and that when they do meet, service delivery at office level is delayed for people in the queues.
• Interviews being focussed on compelling mothers to admit negligence for applying late, rather than on verifying the accuracy of the information provided.
• Home Affairs officials and interview committees insisting on reports from social workers, newspaper adverts for abandoned children, and/or court orders in cases where it is not required by the law.
• Home Affairs officials requesting supporting documents that are not legally required when the application was lodged, due to a Home Affairs caused delay resulting in the child having aged considerably since the application was lodged.
• Lack of interprovincial cooperation between Home Affairs offices to verify births that occurred in another province, or school attendance in another province.

Lack of cooperation between provincial DHA offices

Some of the caregivers we are assisting have been told by Western Cape Home Affairs offices that their files have been closed or thrown away, and that they must travel to the Eastern Cape where they or their child was born to apply again. Security officers at some Western Cape Home Affairs offices screen people in the queues and instruct those with children born in another province that they cannot apply for a LRB in the Western Cape.

There is no legal requirement that an application for birth registration must be lodged in the child’s province of birth, and many caregivers do not have the financial ability to return to the province of birth for this purpose alone. When this practice was brought to the Minister’s attention in November 2024 via a Parliamentary Question, he responded that this was not Home Affairs policy and anyone turning an applicant away for this reason would face disciplinary action. However, more than a year later we still encounter this practice in the Western Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng.

Other parents or caregivers are also told to go to the province where they or their child was born to get new copies of the supporting documents that they lodged – in particular proof of birth from the health facility where the child was born. This causes long delays for many children due to the family having to save money to afford the inter-provincial travel. A simple email between Home Affairs offices in the two affected provinces would easily solve this challenge faced by many LRB applications in the backlog. Home Affairs also has officials based in most of the busy maternity wards in health facilities, making access to birth records across provinces something that should be easy to sort out.

Our court action seeks to compel Home Affairs to address these systemic problems

Our legal action seeks a court order that compels Home Affairs to develop a clear and detailed diagnosis of the bottlenecks in the LRB process, as well as a step-by-step plan to address these bottlenecks and to prevent the reoccurrence of such severe delays for current and future LRB applications.

1. Client refers to parents and children who are assisted by the Children’s Institute legal services project.
2. At 14:15 into the news interview the DHA Provincial Manager explains that LRB files have been destroyed in the fire.