Births and Deaths Registry starved of support

The lack of logistics at the Births and Deaths Registry is hampering the efforts of officials at the registry to perform their core duties.

Registrar Yaw Agbeko told Joy News only two of its ten regional offices have official vehicles.

“We have vehicles in Central Region and then the Northern Regions, all the other regions they don’t have any vehicles’.

This he says prevents officials at the Registry from going into the communities to gather information as they occur. 

The Births and Deaths Registry was established by the Act301 of 1965, within the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to handle and develop the births and deaths registration system in Ghana.

Its core mandate is to provide accurate and reliable information on all births and deaths occurring within Ghana for Socio-economic development of the country through their registration and certification.

Mr. Abgeko said their expected budget for 2013 came in September but they were unable to put it to meaningful use because it was less than fifty percent of what they expected.

Even though the rest of the money for last year was not released, Joy News has learnt that money for the first quarter of this year has been released.

He fears that the offices of the registry which are accommodated in wooden structures pose a risk to workers and most data could be lost because the system is not computerized.

Even though the Registry has seen some renovation in the form of paintings, it still has to rely on benevolence of some private institutions such as Plan Ghana and UNICEF to work.