Births/Deaths registry bemoans low registration
The Ag. Registrar of the Births and Deaths Registry, Henrietta Lamptey, has bemoaned the low level of civil registrations and vital statistics in the country.
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She said although the country had a long history of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS), the level of registration of such events and the quality of the data produced remained low.
She said the situation was much dire in the area of death registration.
Mrs Lamptey was speaking at a workshop for institutions whose operations centred around the production of CRVS.
However, the Registrar expressed the hope that participants would be equipped with the requisite knowledge and skills to improve the process of registering vital events.
That, she said, would help the country achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target 16.9.
Workshop
The 4-day workshop, which was organised by the Births and Deaths Registry in collaboration with the Ghana Statistical Service, formed part of activities of the CRVS system improvement framework project in Ghana.
Sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the workshop brought together participants from the Ghana Police Service, National Identification Authority, Judicial Service, Ghana Health Service, National Road Safety Authority, Office of the Attorney General’s Department, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Others are the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development, Pathology Department of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Registrar General’s Department and other individuals with expertise in the CRVS system in Ghana.
Participants were taken through various topics that were aimed at improving their understanding of the business process models of CRVS.
They were admonished to see CRVS as a business and treat it as such by becoming more client centered.
They were then split into task teams to develop solutions to a wide array of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics themes such as marriage, divorce, birth registration and death registration among others
Improving CRVS
The Chief of the Demographic and Social Statistics Section at the African Centre for Statistics of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Dr William Muhwava, said UNECA was committed to help improve the country’s CRVS system.
He commended the institutions and agencies for the work they had done so far.
Dr Muhwava admonished participants to own the CRVS system and drive it.
He was of the view that in this time of donor fatigue, there was the need for Ghana to be more proactive to ensure the country got things right this time round.
A consultant for the initiative, Dr Felicia Dake, said the workshop had brought together different stakeholders in the CRVS value chain to critically examine the current status of the CRVS system and to develop a sustainable strategy to improve and run the system effectively and efficiently.
