Tanzania’s strides in births, deaths registration serve as lesson
TANZANIA’s achievements in registering births and deaths have lured delegations from Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, who have visited the country for learning purpose.
A total of 16 delegates are in the country for five-day training under the Registration Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (RITA).
According to a statement issued by RITA’s Chief Executive Officer Angela Anatory, stated that the objective of their visit is to get knowledge on how the government managed to decentralise responsibilities of registering births and deaths to grassroots level and use of mobile phone technology in feeding data of registered people.
The delegates include experts on registration of key life events in their countries.
During their stay, they will visit the registration centres located in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya regions.
The visitors will also get opportunity to tour the National Identification Authority where they will observe how its system has been linked to that of the RITA.
One of the delegates, Mr Brutesfa Mulugeta, Executive Director of Immigration and Citizenship Services in Ethiopia, said their visit was upon the 6th meeting of African leaders responsible for registration of key life events held in Ethiopia in last October, where it was noted that there were some African countries doing well in registering key life events, hence others should learn from them.
“We congratulate Tanzania for the big step it made in improving system of registering births. We believe that we will learn and exchange experiences for the sake making improvements in our countries,” Mr Mulugeta stated.
Tanzania, like any other African countries, has embarked on efforts to improve its system of registering human key life events in order to benefit from the acquired statistics.
In 2012, Tanzania embarked on improvements by initiating the Under-Five Birth Registration Initiative which intends to bring closer to citizens the services on free of charge.
Such services are available at the ward offices and health services provision centres.
So far, the programme is implemented in 23 regions of Tanzania mainland and has enabled the registration and issuance of birth certificated to 8.1 million children under five years old.
Ms Anatory said such achievements have attracted several African countries to come to Tanzania to get experiences and see how they could implement in their countries.
