Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 28, 2017 News
The coalition administration in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
will be working together to achieve 100 percent birth registration. This is according to Minister of Citizenship, Winston Felix.
The Minister stated that birth certificates are important identity documents for everyone, particularly children. He commented that birth certificates facilitate immunization.
He said that the document proves to school administrators that the child has reached school age and could be admitted. Felix also stated that it enables law enforcement to determine whether a person in custody is a child or an adult.
In circumstances, he said that it establishes the age of the child when it must be known whether the child is capable of committing a crime and contracting guilt.
He said that the APNU/AFC Government is elated to be working with UNICEF to ensure that all children are registered at birth. The Minister of Citizenship said that there have been outreaches in the outlying Regions in Guyana, except Regions Three and Four, funded by UNICEF. There were 491,117 late registration recorded in the other Regions.
Felix explained that late registration occurs when the one-year period required by law passes without the birth of the child being registered. He said that there are more unregistered births which will be pursued in the coming months.
The Minister noted that the need to have all births registered supports a wider plan to digitize the records at the General Registrar’s Office (GRO). Already, Felix said, a project has commenced and is continuing to build a database of records between 1987 and the current period.
There is another period between 1896 and 1986. This documentation will commence shortly. This project, he said, is about to commence as the procurement process is being pursued.
“When both projects are completed, we would be prepared to print our birth certificates, achieve faster searches for birth records, reduce the time it now takes to produce a birth certificate, and the system would become a reliable database to create a national identity system which is supported by biometric features,” the Minister of Citizenship expressed.
He continued, “We should recall President David Granger’s recent pronouncement while addressing the Parliament on October 13, 2016. Then, he promised to table the National Registration (Amendment) Bill to allow for the inclusion of biometrics of citizens to be recorded on their national registration cards.”
Felix said that work is being done to identify international best practices to aid the development of the system. This is a work-in-progress Felix said.
He added, “This process envisages that, once a person’s birth is registered, he or she should carry one registration number to death. In other words, there is no need for 15 or more identification cards. The same identification one would have at birth would be the one at the time of registration.”
The Minister of Citizenship said that the same number proceeds to one’s driver’s licence, taxpayer identification number (TIN) and bank account. Felix emphasized that this is useful to prevent fraud.
Felix noted that there was a case of cricketers using falsified identification cards for their own personal benefit. The Minister said that with an upgraded system, such cases can be prevented.
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