South Africa
As of 2013, UNICEF estimated that nearly 230 million children under age five worldwide did not have their births registered. Approximately, 82 percent of these unregistered children lived in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. To address this in South Africa, the Department of Home Affairs employed a strategy of active reach, in which social services such as birth registration are delivered to those hardest to reach. In 2007, the Department of Social Development’s SASSA launched the Integrated Community Registration Outreach Programme (ICROP) initiative that organizes the mobile provision of social services to South Africans living in less accessible areas. To bolster child health and birth registration, the Department of Health began issuing Road to Health booklets to ensure all children’s health and development indicators are carefully recorded and monitored.
RESEARCHERS
Anthony Marchese
Anthony Marchese is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, Trinity College, where he studied International Relations with double minors in Political Science & European Studies. As a member of the Reach Project, he conducted research on the case of birth registration in South Africa. Anthony is currently pursuing his Master's in China Studies at the Yenching Academy of Peking University, where he studies Chinese international affairs.
Kourosh Houshmand
Kourosh is a recipient of Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 Award for his work in tech innovation and media. He was an Artificial Intelligence Strategist at the Associated Press in New York, researching methods to algorithmically quantify human emotions in text and speech. Before that, Kourosh was documentary host and content developer for VICE. He serves as an education technology advisor at the MaRS Discovery District — one of North America’s largest innovation hubs— and is an alumnus of Canada’s leading startup accelerator, the Next 36 program. Kourosh completed his M.S. in data science and journalism at Columbia University on academic scholarship. Raised in Toronto, Kourosh received his B.A. from the University of Toronto (Trinity College) and was on the South Africa birth registration team for the Reach Project.
Kimberly Skead
Kimberly Skead is a research assistant in the Awadalla laboratory at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), the Research Program Coordinator for the Canadian Data Integration Centre and the National Scientific Coordinator for the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project. At OICR, her research is focused on studying genomic alterations in the mature blood pool and how they impact chronic disease development. She will be starting her PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto in September 2018 and previously completed a Hon. BSc in Global Health and Genome Biology at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Kimberly is a News Writer for the Global Health Next Generation Network and a former member and project assistant for the International Centre for Disability and Rehabilitation Cameroon Team where she investigated the state of inclusive education for children with disabilities in Cameroon. Her work in Cameroon is continued through her work with Open Dreams; an organization tasked to empower disadvantaged youth and provide access to international education opportunities. Additionally, she is the Program Development and Fundraising Officer for the Kenya Association for Maternal and Neonatal Health and sits on their Executive Advisory Board. Kimberly is a former fellow of the Reach Project where she was a member of the South Africa research team and investigated the mechanisms employed to increase birth registration rates in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Stephanie Lim
Stephanie Lim was a member of the South Africa team (2016) focused on investigating improvements in birth registration rates. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto where she completed her Honours Bachelor of Arts in Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies. Her primary research interests include topics in forced migration, transnational labour migration, and citizenship. She has previously worked in Myanmar with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) as an intern with their Electoral Support program (STEP Democracy). She is currently studying towards her Master's degree in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford and in her spare time enjoys participating in outdoor activities.
Aditya Rau
Aditya Rau’s international upbringing across the Middle East, Europe and North America fostered his desire to design and implement innovative solutions to global challenges. Aditya is an Analyst at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, where his work focuses on reducing income and information inequality by connecting people to the virtual networks that power the modern economy. Prior to joining Mastercard, Aditya was an Aga Khan International Youth Fellow in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where he worked on strategy and communications for a regional early childhood development program. An alumnus of the Reach Project, his research took him to South Africa where he completed fieldwork examining the country’s success in scaling its birth registration rate; the research has been recognized and cited by the World Bank. Aditya earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Trinity College in the University of Toronto where he studied as a Whiteside Scholar.
