Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has announced that from next year every new born baby will be given a unique identification number to be used from childhood till death.
According to Dr. Bawumia, this will be achieved by linking the births and deaths registry to the NIA database.
By so doing, he indicated that “there will be a tracking of pregnant women at antenatal clinics.”
He mentioned that some 13,000 tablets which were recently used in the population census will be provided by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to make this exercise successful.
“Births and Deaths Digitization: Easily one of the most depressing visits I have paid to a government office during my time as Vice President was to the Births and Deaths Registry headquarters. It was chaotic, it was messy and it was sad. It turned out that the Births and Deaths Registry had three separate databases as registers for births and deaths and these databases were in silos. It is not surprising therefore that corruption and fake birth certificates thrived in this environment.
“Thankfully, the process of digitization of the records is almost complete and the three databases have been cleaned up and integrated. Furthermore, we are integrating the births and deaths register with the databases of Ghana Health Service, National Identification Authority, Ghana Statistical Service, Immigration and the Police so that the record of births and deaths should be consistent across all these databases.
“Starting next year, it is envisaged that every new born child will within a year get a Ghanacard number but the actual card will be issued when the child is grown and the biometrics are fully formed,” the Vice President said when speaking at a public lecture at Ashesi University on Tuesday November 2, 2021.
By Vincent Kubi