Imagine growing up in South Africa without any legal proof that you exist. Thousands of children are trapped in a backlog of birth registration applications, leaving them unable to access the documents they need and forcing their caregivers into a lengthy bureaucratic struggle. This is the hidden cost of being invisible to the state. Daily Maverick’s Tamsin Metelerkamp reports.
Reporting by: Tamsin Metelerkamp
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Joel Seboa
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative lead by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Kevin Flynn
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Imagine being born in a country, but never officially existing in its records.
You can’t prove who you are. You can’t get the documents you need. And even though you were born here, you’re effectively invisible to the state.
For thousands of South African children, this is a daily reality. They’re caught in the backlog for what’s known as Late Registration of Birth applications, the process required when a baby’s birth is not registered within 30 days.
Without that registration, you can spend years in limbo. And if you’re the person caring for that child, often a mother, grandmother or aunt with limited financial resources, getting them recognised by the system can become a long and exhausting struggle.
The lack of access to documentation is often generational. The University of Cape Town’s Children’s Institute has observed that one of the main reasons babies are not registered within 30 days of birth is that many mothers do not have identity documents when they give birth.
There are other challenges too. For parents living in rural areas, long distances and high transport costs can make it difficult to reach registration offices. Some mothers face health complications after labour that delay the process, while registering abandoned children often involves complex administrative procedures.
Even if you want to register your child, the process can be difficult. At Home Affairs offices, you may face long waits for documents to be processed, delays in interview procedures, and poor communication between offices in different provinces.
If you’re a caregiver with limited financial resources, these challenges can be even harder to overcome. You may have to travel long distances and cover the costs yourself, sometimes just to get proof-of-birth documents from the health facility where your child was born.
The situation has culminated in a legal showdown at the Western Cape High Court. The UCT Children’s Institute and a group of affected parents, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, are seeking a structural interdict that would compel the Department of Home Affairs to develop a comprehensive, transparent plan to address the late registration of birth applications backlog. They claim that systemic problems at the department are contributing to a large and growing number of undecided applications.
Even the data is a battlefield. In 2023, the then minister of home affairs Dr Aaron Motsoaledi told Parliament that a backlog of more than 250,000 undecided late registration of birth applications had accumulated between 2018 and 2022.
In court papers, the Department of Home Affairs says it has significantly reduced the backlog of unresolved cases, reporting that just over 33,000 applications were still pending in May 2025. But the Children’s Institute challenges that figure. It argues that the department’s system for tracking undecided applications is outdated and lacks transparency. According to expert analysis submitted as part of the institute’s court case, the true backlog was estimated to be more than 240,000 cases in 2024.
At the court hearing for the case on 10 June 2026, Home Affairs insisted that the numbers were a moving target and that judicial intervention wasn’t justified because they were actively resolving applications. But human rights lawyers argued that not enough was being done to help the unrecognised children trapped in the complex, drawn-out process for late registration of birth.
Section 28 of the Constitution states that every child has a right to a name and a nationality from birth. Yet, for young people who age out of the system without an ID, the future is bleak - they battle to write matric, go to university, open a bank account or get a legal job.
As the High Court deliberates, affected families remain in limbo, waiting to see whether children who have long been invisible to the system will finally be seen. DM