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.

Workshop

The workshop, sponsored by the Netherlands government, was the beginning of a series of training programmes to commence next month to equip staff of the registry with the skills in validating identity documents, especially birth and death certificates, to combat complex document fraud.

As part of efforts to equip the registry, the Netherlands presented 50 document security magnifiers to enhance its work.

Ms Lamptey said the collaboration between the registry, the Netherlands Embassy and other foreign missions such as Norway, Canada and the United Kingdom in capacity-building would better equip it to sustain the gains and improve on them in the long run.

Collaboration

The Netherlands Ambassador to Ghana, Jeroen Verheul, said his country was interested in enhancing the work of the registry to promote legal migration since in modern societies verifying the authentic identity of a person was key.

He stated that identity verification was not only important for government services domestically, but also internationally because the Netherlands needed to be able to rely on the authenticity and value of documents issued by the Ghanaian government to uphold the correct identities of migrants.

More importantly, Mr Verheul said, the collaboration was essential to curb identity fraud and prevent criminal syndicates with sophisticated techniques and highly developed organisations from infiltrating such identity chains.

The Dutch ambassador said identity chains were vulnerable and needed to be protected as they were under threat all over the world.

“So even in a highly sophisticated administration and economy as the Netherlands, we face the impact of these criminal organisations.

So we need to work together,” Mr Verheul stressed.

The Netherlands, the ambassador said, was enthused about working together with colleagues from other embassies to enhance the capacities and skills of the Ghanaian officials that they worked with to enable them to deal with identity and document fraud.

The Minister of State, Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development, Osei Bonsu Amoah, gave the assurance that the ministry was ready to support the registry and its partners to ensure that the processing of birth and death certificates in the country was genuine and authentic.

Background

In the 2022 State of the Nation’s Address, President Akufo-Addo applauded the registry over the moves to digitise its operations to enhance its services.

“Never again will it be that someone, born in this country, will live a full life, die and be buried without any record of his or her existence.

The operations of the Births and Deaths Registry are finally being digitised to make sure that documents issued from that department are accorded the respect they should have,” he said.

The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, in June 2020 during a visit to the registry in Accra, expressed the hope that the digitisation of the operations of the registry could be completed that year after announcing that 80 per cent of the registry’s records had been digitised.

When completed, he explained, the database of the registry would be integrated with that of the National Identification Authority for the issuance of a single national identification number for everyone from birth to death.

The database was also to be integrated into other agencies such as the Social Security and National Insurance Trust and the National Health Insurance Authority.