Sunyani, Sept. 3, GNA - One hundred and fifty members of Unit Committees in the Sunyani Municipality in the Brong-Ahafo Region on Thursday, attended a day's training workshop at Sunyani aimed at equipping them with skills to facilitate the Compulsory Nation-wide Registration of Births and Deaths exercise in their communities. The training forms part pilot programmes in six districts including the Kintampo District, to ensure the successful take off of the exercise.

Mr Sampson Achiribangni, Regional Registration Officer of the Births and Deaths Registry, told GNA that Unit Committee members were included in the programme to enhance the exercise, especially in the remotest parts of the country.

He, therefore, appealed to the participants to take the workshop seriously to enable them to impart the skills and knowledge that they had acquired to their counterparts who could not get the opportunity to attend.

Mr Achiribangni said the registration exercise would focus on infants aged between one and 12 months, which would be free, adding that no nation could develop without the compilation of accurate data that should start with the registration of births and deaths for socio-economic planning.

He said the community population register programme was initiated in 1990 following a ministerial meeting to devise ways of getting the majority of children aged between zero and five immunized against the six childhood killer diseases.

"The need to assess the accurate population size of the various communities was identified as essential for the programme". Mr Achiribangni said the Registry in collaboration with other governmental and international organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), designed the community population register for data collection in the country.

He said: "This register is designed to serve as population register at the local level and make provisions for the continuous recording and updating of information on every individual in the population of a community".

Mr Stephen Morbe, Sunyani Municipal Registration Officer, said the exercise was aimed at gathering information including name, sex, date of birth, educational level, marital status, occupation, internal migration and immunization status of persons residing in a community, which would be regularly updated with the occurrence of births and deaths.