Government to register all births, marriages, divorces, deaths over next six years

[BabuK]

Registration Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (RITA)


The government in collaboration with development partners is working on a six year strategic plan to improve civil registration and statistics.

Dubbed, "Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Strategy" (CRVS) the strategic plan focuses on registration and statistics in four vital events, birth, marriage, divorce and death.

The development comes in light of the Population and Housing Census report of 2012 that revealed about 80 per cent of Tanzanians have no birth certificates.

Officiating the meeting which brought together different stakeholders including the Registration Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (RITA), National Bureau of Statistics (NBC) and development partners, the Ministry of Constitution and Legal Affair Permanent Secretary Maimuna Tarish said the strategic plan aims to have ‘zero civil unregistered by 2021.'

"As we open this CRVS strategic plan meeting to be implemented over six years, we set directions and establish areas of priority to enable Tanzania realise its goal of ensuring every citizen is recognized by 2021," noted the PS.

She explained that he overall estimated budget is USD 500 million distributed over a period of six years commenced on June 2015- June 2021.

"The national decision of improving CRVS is in line with several global conventions and resolution for both CR and VS that show the roots and give weight to the concept of CVRS," Tarish added.

According to her, the first year will be preparatory time and the following five years will be scaling up the implementation.

"The number of citizens registered is very few leaving a majority of the people unrecognised administratively anywhere," she admitted.
"Death registration rate is almost inexistent and causes of death are either wrongly reported or not reported at all making health interventions difficult," she added.

"The lack of such data hampers making of informed development policies and programmes and also hinders promotion of accountability and transparency within the government," she said.

RITA's acting chief executive officer Emmy Hudson said the current civil registration system is lowest service at district levels; "this and other reasons pose a challenge to many and stalls service delivery," she said.

She said the agency alone can't meet these challenges and called upon stakeholders to join forces.

RITA registration manager Angel Anatori mentioned weak legal and operation framework as a hinder of CRVS resulted to low number of civil registered.

"Majority of Tanzanians come to this world and leave without being registered, they are administratively invisible," she said.
According to her, the agency is working on strengthening the current system, conducting mass campaigns on importance of civil registrations such as birth and death certificates.

"We are currently running a registration initiative of birth certificates through children in schools," she noted.

NBS senior statistician Emilian Karugendo mentioned challenges affecting civil registration to include low awareness that would otherwise increase knowledge on essentials of registration and inaccessibility of registration services particular in rural areas.

Others are, lack of technology infrastructure to facilitate registration, low skill levels among registration practitioners, lack of political will and inadequate financial support.


Source: The Guardian