Cameroon: When birth certificates represent children who do not exist

In the world of legal identity, it is said that a child without a birth certificate does not exist, but in Cameroon, the paradox is unfolding. Fake birth certificates representing non-existent children are suspected to be at the heart of a major payroll fraud currently under government investigation.

The Ministry of Finance has, in recent weeks, been conducting a nationwide census to verify the authenticity of more than 950,000 birth certificates submitted by public servants benefiting from the state’s family allowance scheme. The scheme involves payments made to eligible public workers based on the number of children they have, either biologically or under their guardianship as legal wards.

Launched in June, the second phase of the verification exercise is set to end on Saturday, August 15. It comes after the Ministry of Finance found that state expenditure on family allowance payments had risen sharply and suspiciously over a three-year period, prompting officials to dig deeper into the matter.

Preliminary checks, ministry officials said, suggested that thousands of civil servants may have been fraudulently benefiting from the scheme, in some cases, using fake birth certificates.

In a statement issued in June, the Finance Ministry explained that the census was largely prompted by an alarming and statistically impossible surge in declared dependent children figures. It stated that the number of declared children on the state payroll exploded from 594,728 in June 2024, to 923,307 in March 2026, representing a 55.3 percent spike, or an additional 328,579 registered children, in just 21 months.

The ministry added that the surge intensified just after a February 2024 presidential decree which raised monthly child allowances from FCFA 2,800 (US$4.90) per child, to FCFA 4,500 (US$7.90). Consequently, the total annual public spending allocated for this purpose by the state nearly doubled, jumping from FCFA 21 billion (US$36.8 million) to FCFA 38 billion (US$66.5 million).

In the face of this situation, the attention of the Prime Minister was called, who then ordered the nationwide census now under way, with the objective to confirm that every child listed for family allowance benefits is a genuine and existing child.

According to the ministry, the main technical mechanism used to exploit the system has been the submission of “falsified, duplicate, or completely fabricated birth certificates” to simulate ‘ghost children.’ Officials referenced the case of a beneficiary who had an alarming 83 children listed for benefits.

As such, the government made the submission of clean copies of birth certificates for all declared dependent children a mandatory requirement for the ongoing census. In many cases, parents are made to physically present the children as a verification layer, before they are issued a proof of life certificate for the children. National ID cards are also a mandatory requirement for the census.

In an interview with Cameroon’s state broadcaster CRTV on July 26, the Director of Personnel Expenditure and Pensions in the Ministry of Finance and head of the Technical Committee in charge of the census, Robert Simo Kegne, said of the 180,806 beneficiaries targeted, only 61,000 had complied as of the end of the first phase on July 25.

He added that at the time, slightly over 301,000 copies of birth certificates had been collected for an audit which is being conducted in partnership with the National Civil Status Registration Office (BUNEC), the government agency responsible for civil registration.

Kegne, who represents the Finance ministry on BUNEC’s Board, said although the census was still to reach 50 percent of the target after the first phase, results obtained from the field already give them a clue about where most of the irregularities lie. He echoed the aspect of forged birth certificates which is what he said they are paying particular attention to during the verification exercise.

“When you have a birth certificate on which there is no name of the mother of the child, we believe that something is wrong somewhere,” Kegne said. “We are following instructions given by the Prime Minister. He asked us first to identify fraudsters and fake children represented by fake birth certificates, and then remove them from the file index.”

Kegne added that after the clean-up, the ministry hopes to recover some of the money paid out to ineligible beneficiaries, and the amount could go up to FCFA eight billion yearly (US$14 million).

Simon Nokuri Ekpa, Divisional Officer for Tiko, a local administrator in the South West Region of the country, who is involved in certifying birth certificates for different use cases such as public service recruitment exams, admitted in an interview with CRTV that “there are so many fake documents already detected in the course of our verification.”

“It may be true that a state employee has 20 children, but what we don’t understand is how birth certificates are established on different civil status registers for sets of twins or triplets. We have seen a series of birth certificates that carry the same court judgement number and the same references,” Ekpa said.

Cameroon is not new to payroll fraud involving forged birth certificates. In 2024, the Ministry of Finance raised the alarm on a pension fraud scheme involving retired police and army officers in which more than 13,000 fake birth certificates were uncovered.

As part of broader government efforts to combat payroll fraud and prevent the loss of millions of dollars to ‘ghost’ workers, the Cameroon government operationalized, AILGLES, a biometric system in early 2025. Public Service Minister, Joseph Le, told a parliamentary plenary in June that the software had enabled government to flag over 53,000 public servants earning undue benefits from the state.

Many countries including Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe, are turning to biometrics to clean their public service payroll systems and curb illegal payments.

Article Topics

birth registration  |  Cameroon  |  civil registration  |  legal identity  |  National Civil Status Registration Office (BUNEC)  |  SDG 16.9  |  synthetic identity fraud