“Well, actually they do issue birth certificates, and they do keep records of births, marriages and deaths. The problem is that their record keeping is a little spotty, and many of these locations have become war zones.”
‘Spotty’ means they don’t keep records that can be trusted. They just as well keep none at all.
In most cases, the records do exist. A lot depends on which country we're talking about. Any country that has had a civil war, or has otherwise become a theater of war, has had some destruction of records.
If records do exist, it's reasonable to rely on them if certified copies are provided by a government agency. No country is immune to the ravages of war. Refugees from Croatia, which is a European Christian country, during the wars and ethnic cleansing of the 1990s sometimes had this problem: birth certificates and marriage licenses and certificates destroyed when a local government office was bombed or burned. It's not limited to Third World countries.