Efforts of running the registration of National Identification (NID) cards is at 99 percent.
Acting Registrar General of the Civil Identity & Registry Office, Noel Mobiha, said much of the registration has been getting rid of a backlog of data.
Mobiha was speaking at the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics: Legal Review Workshop held recently in Port Moresby.
The Civil Identity & Registry Office is expanding slowly on the NID system and learning as it goes.
Mobiha said his team still has a big task ahead, to deliver 2 million NID cards by December 31st, 2019.
“So far we have not done very well. We got some numbers but we are a bit slow while finding processes and systems to cater for the process in terms of numbers coming in.”
Already the CIR has delivered just under 300 thousand NID cards, but that is from work done over 3 years.
Mobiha said 770 thousand registrations are yet to be processed.
“The positive side is that we have a young team, we got a lot of energy, a lot of innovation and new ideas from them to meet this challenge.”
So far the office has been registering births and issuing NID cards; data from adoptions, marriages, divorces and deaths are still below 1 percent.
Mobiha said they need a lot of assistance to register deaths.
The Civil Registration and Vital Statistics workshop was held to give them ideas on how they can establish systems that can assist with mortality numbers.
“For example, if we have a system with the hospital that works well, we have a link directly to the mortuary. When bodies are brought in, we start getting names put out. Perhaps a process where you cannot bury a body, until you have a CIR number to bury. This forces people to follow a process that gets official records collected.”
“At the moment, it’s all ad hoc and nothing has been registered.”
(Acting Registrar General of the Civil Identity & Registry Office, Noel Mobiha)