THE Registrar General’s Department (RGD) is once again expressing concern about a fresh set of children, born between September 1, 2004 and December 31, 2006, who have no names.

There was much public debate last year surrounding the 18,316 nameless children born between January 1, 2003 and August 31, 2004.

According to Dr Patricia Holness, chief executive officer of the RGD, there are 10,000 children born within this age cohort who do not have names recorded by the RGD.

“We are still concerned about the children who are scheduled to enter basic school in this and the next two years,” she said. “The RGD conducted another electronic pull from our database and there are still some 10,000 children born between September 1, 2004 and December 31, 2006 who do not have a name recorded in the RGD.”

Holness, who was speaking at a press conference on the RGD’s Free First Certificate Initiative yesterday at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston, said, however, that the figure was subject to change as children under one year old may still be named at registration centres using a certificate of naming form.

“We encourage the parents to submit these to the nearest registration centre as quickly as possible,” said the RGD boss.

Persons with children over a year-old will be required to complete the process of late entry of name to complete the registration for their children.

Last year June, the RGD’s civil registration and marketing manager, Dr Damian Ffriend, told the Observer that 18,316 Jamaican children who should enter basic school for the first time had no names on their birth records, and were in danger of losing out on places at the opening of the school term.

Ffriend explained that while parents would register the birth of their child, they often neglected to name the child during the registration, which resulted in birth certificates not being drafted for the child. Birth certificates form part of the vital documentation necessary to have children admitted to schools.

Ffriend said that after a child was born at hospital, the parents were supposed to get a notification from the institution, which they should then take to the local district registrar. But very often, because they had not paid the hospital bills, some parents did not go back for the notification. Superstition, he noted, also played a role as some parents considered it bad luck to name the child before its birth.

Last year, the RGD began taking steps to curb the incidence of nameless children by doing away with the traditional method of having children registered and deploying RGD staff at birthing institutions across the island.