Births and Deaths Registry staff build capacity on instruction manual

Staff of the Births and Deaths Registry in the Greater Accra Region have undergone training on a new instruction manual to build their capacity for effective service delivery.

The manual, which serves as a standard operating procedure of services by the registry, includes registration of births, deaths, alterations, searches, sharing of information and reporting to the government statistician.

The two-day training in Accra was organised with the support of UNICEF. 

Mandate

The acting Registrar of the Registry, Henrietta Lamptey, explained that Section 47 of the Registration of Briths and Deaths Act 2020 (Act 1027) mandates the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development by legislative instrument to make regulations.

She said the Births and Deaths Regulations 2021, also mandated the registry to develop an instruction manual. Ms Lamptey added that section four of the regulations also allowed the registrar to issue instruction manuals to staff of the registry.

In line with that, she said the registry, with support from UNICEF, developed the manual in 2022, which was validated by stakeholders in June, 2023. Ms Lamptey said the instruction manual had since been published and that the next phase in the implementation process was a nationwide training of staff of the registry.

She further said that the introduction of the manual had led to improvement in service delivery at the registry, and mentioned ICT, customer services and the harmonisation of their system with the National Identification Authority (NIA) as some of the benefits.

Significance

A Child Protection Specialist of UNICEF Ghana, Emmanuel Nyarko-Tetteh, said the benefits of birth registration were necessary for national planning. “Governments rely on accurate data to assess population needs and make critical decisions about resource allocation — including those that affect the hardest-to-reach families,” he said.

Mr Nyarko-Tetteh added that the ability of governments to account for citizens lies on an effective and efficient civil registration system that was inclusive of all persons born and given a legal identity, including children on the move.

He said it was based on this that UNICEF Ghana continued to work closely with the registry to attain universal birth registration in the country. “Now, more than ever, all citizens need access to legal documents as evidence of identity, civil status and family relations.

“Unless birth registration is recognised as essential, we stand to lose the gains birth and death registration had made in recent decades,” he added.