Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, the Minister for Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development (MLGDRD), says the Births and Deaths Registry is a sector that needs government intervention to boost operations.

He said the Registry was a very important strategic national agency that needed national or governmental support to effectively position its operations and reforms aimed at enhancing public service delivery.

“If you go there, there is a huge storage of data, spanning as far back as 1929 and so on, so there’s a huge collection of data. They’re making their efforts to try and computerise them and make sure that they create a backup,” he added.

The Minister was speaking to the media after paying a working visit to the two offices of the Births and Deaths Registry, at the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS) and the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG).

The purpose of the working visit was to emphasise the relevance of the Registry’s operations and assess the robustness of its Information Technology Infrastructure, ensuring data integrity and exploring avenues for reinforcement.

“They have a perfect collection of data spanning years back, but the fear is how do we computerise it to create a backup to the hard copies that are being stored,” he said. Mr. Korsah said they had engaged with the Registrar to explore avenues for proposing initiatives that sought state support.

“A while ago we were looking at why people are here. So, they are here to correct problems that have come up because their data was duplicated for some other people by the work of criminals who cheat the system and try to do their own things, where people have fallen victims.”

“But the assurance we are getting, which is very good, is that currently, the issue has been resolved, such that they have had in-built measures or mechanisms to prevent people from duplicating data or numbers in the system,” he stressed.

The Minister said their decentralised operations were proceeding smoothly, such that at the district level, registrations were initiated, and subsequent steps involved processing at the regional level for data printing.

He added that, however, the challenge lay in the significant influx of people at both district and regional levels. Therefore, expanding their operations and allocating additional resources would enable them to increase staffing capacity.

Korsah said the ministry was working on providing the Registry with a befitting office complex in Greater Accra, adding that substantial progress had been made in that regard. “I think that they should even be elevated to become an Authority so that they have far-reaching powers to enhance their operations and make it more effective,” he added.

He said the Ministry was currently in discussions with the Attorney General to draft legislation on their behalf, followed by the requisite parliamentary procedures.

Madam Constance Clara Anani, Head of Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit for the Registry, said the Births and Deaths Registry was embarking on a mass registration and sensitisation across the 261 districts in the country to be able to register the births that had been left out.

She said they were currently registering births from newborns up to 12 months old for free, and that mothers who had missed the registration window from the 261 districts should take advantage.

“So, for the purposes of this exercise, our officers are moving out of their offices and going into the communities, the marketplaces, and the hospitals for the registration,” Madam Anani added. She said birth registration was a continuous process and that for the purposes of the mop-up registration, it was stimulated for seven days, targeting 30,000 births nationwide.

Madam Anani said they often registered about 90 percent of births that were normally recorded by the Ghana Health Service in their facilities. “So, we work hand in hand with the Ghana Health Service to be able to achieve these targets,” she added.