The Births and Deaths Registry has digitised about six million out of the over 30 million records in a major effort to modernise its operations for better documentation and easy accessibility.
At an inception workshop to commence a training series on document fraud, the Ag. Registrar of Births and Deaths, Henrietta Lamptey, stated that her outfit needed the infrastructural, funding, systems, working equipment and capacity-building support to complete the entire process.
She said the registry was on a transformation agenda and, therefore, needed to digitise all services and clear all backlogs with regard to manual records.
“We hold over 30 million manual records dating back to 1912 and some from 1898 on births and deaths registration.
We’ve been able to digitise six million.
We still seek full support to complete the whole task,” Ms Lamptey stated, and called for support from the government, foreign partners and stakeholders.
That, she indicated, would make the registry to successfully achieve its mandate and be competitive globally.
Meanwhile, she said the process of integrating the systems of the registry with certain key stakeholders such as the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and National Identification Authority (NIA) was almost complete.
“We have advanced our effort to develop and very soon, hopefully by the end of August, we will launch an official website where all our services will be accessed,” she said.
Ms Lamptey added that the registry was pursuing a cashless system whereby all its services could be accessed online.
The registry has a strong correlation with the Ghana Immigration Service, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the police, all geared towards a solid identity management system, she added.
