Ms Emmanulle Mitte, Senior Regional Protection Office, UNHCR Country Representative in Senegal, has appealed to West African nations to make the needed changes in their constitutions to allow women transfer their nationalities to their children.

She said a lot of countries in the West African sub region, especially Liberia and to some extent Sierra Leone, mandated only the men to transfer their nationalities to their children, which she said was an affront to gender balance.

Ms Mitte said this in Saly on Thursday during a workshop for 30 journalists from the Sub Region aimed at addressing the need to curb statelessness in the region.

Statelessness refers to the condition of an individual who is not considered as a national by any State, under the operation of its law although he or she resides in that State.

Its main causes include inability to register children at birth, gaps in nationality laws, administrative practices, complicating or obstructing access to documentation, failure to include all residents in the body of citizens when a State becomes independent, or when part of a territory is annexed to a new State.

Ms Mitte also mentioned lack of education of parents on the need to register their children, poor infrastructure for the registration of children, and poor data management systems as some of the other factors promoting statelessness in the sub –region.

The workshop was to educate journalists in the sub-region on the rising incidence of statelessness and how to draw their Governments attention to the phenomenon.

Ms Mitte said the inability for mothers to transfer their nationality to their children could be cited as one of the major reasons giving rise to the incidence of statelessness of children in the sub-region.

“It is sad that some nationality laws restrict mothers to transmit their nationality to their children, even in the case of birth in their countries or territories,” she added.

She noted that out of the one million stateless people found in West Africa, 60 per cent of them were children who were stateless due to their inability to have their mothers’ identity, because they had no fathers or because their parents failed to register them at birth.

She said statelessness was a serious issue as it robbed victims of their identity and made their lives a living hell making them not recognised and, therefore, not entitled to any right offered to citizens of the countries in which they resided.

She described as unfortunate the inability of many nationality laws not to grant nationality to foundlings (children found in a state without parents), thereby giving rise to the incidence of statelessness.

“The absence of safeguards for foundlings is an important source of statelessness in West Africa, and as a result, a large number of children have been abandoned or become orphans, for whom no information is available about place of birth or parents,” she said.

She advised women who marry foreign men and tend to naturalise or switch to the nationalities of their husbands to be very cautious, as upon divorce it might be very difficult for them to re-acquire their original nationalities.

“A few laws provide that in case of change of civil status, a foreign woman who naturalised through marriage would lose her nationality upon divorce, and in such a situation, if the woman cannot re-acquire her nationality of origin, she becomes stateless,” Ms Mitte said.

She appealed to parents to endeavour to keep well, the birth certificates of their children, as the lack of it was an obstacle to the establishment of one’s nationality.