Vera Songwe, the Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, said on Thursday that African countries face fundamental challenges in their bid to address the legal identity gap in Africa. She said that during the opening of a ministerial session of the ongoing fifth conference of African ministers responsible for civil registration in Lusaka, Zambia, organized by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and its partners. One of the challenges, she said, is that of weak and archaic civil registration systems that fail to achieve key principles of completeness, universality, and accuracy. Songwe said: Many countries run fragmented paper-based systems, with a huge burden of reporting placed on the public, and with a requirement to travel long distances to access registration services. This manual nature of civil registration databases in many countries limits their ability to support other important government functions, therefore, contributing to their under-resourcing and underutilization by governments. The other challenge, she said, which is of growing concern is the notable increase in investments made by many African governments towards sophisticated civil identification systems that are delinked from civil registration systems. Allow me to underline that robust civil identification databases can only be sustained when linked and updated with timely birth and death data that flow from civil registration. Songwe explained that this necessitates that the architecture of civil registration databases should be modern, innovative and able to correspond to that applied for civil identification. Moreover, according to Songwe, the systems must be supported by appropriate legal and institutional frameworks for their efficient functioning. The Lusaka conference has emphasized the importance of the continent to create a modern and comprehensive Civil Registration and Vital statistic System (CRVS) so that every person on the continent is visible. Security Josephine Mukesha, the Director-General of the National Identification Agency, told Sunday Times that as Rwanda moves to enhance its CRVS systems, considerable effort is also being made to, among others, secure the digital platform because the security of citizens’ documents was very important. Mukesha said: We have a multi-stakeholder committee and the security of the system is looked into by Risa and Minict. On Monday, Mukesha said the 2016 law governing persons and family is up for amendment so that clauses on civil registration can be improved. Civil registration is now only handled at Sector level and abroad (in embassies) but they want to extend the civil registration mandate to some staff in health facilities, among others, so as to “have the one-stop center principle” established in the national civil registration framework. With this in place, it is expected that the national CRVS process will be more efficient. Half of Africas babies not registered Oliver Chinganya, Director of the African Statistics Centre at the ECA, said it was not right that half of Africa’s population is not registered at birth. This, he said, rendered most of the continent’s poor unseen, uncounted and excluded, affecting their ability to enjoy universal rights. Chinganya said the call by UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, to reduce the identity gap by 300 million by 2025, was a mammoth but achievable task if the continent addressed the challenges of its registration systems. The World Bank estimates that globally, more than 1.5 billion people lack proof of legal identity. About half of them are in Africa. editor@newtimesrwanda.com
