Latest news with #CRVS
Business Recorder
4 days ago
- Health
- Business Recorder
Trilateral agreements signed: NADRA to implement digital tools in healthcare facilities across ICT, GB
ISLAMABAD: The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) on Friday signed trilateral agreements to implement digital birth and death notification tools in healthcare facilities across Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). According to an official statement issue by the authority, digital tools will enable real-time registration of births and deaths at the point of occurrence. An agreement was signed at the GB Secretariat in Gilgit, linking GB's health facilities with NADRA and local CRMS sites managed by the Local Government and Rural Development Department. Another agreement was signed with the Ministry of National Health Services and the ICT Administration for Islamabad. Similar partnerships have been established in Sindh and Balochistan, as NADRA continues to expand the initiative nationwide. This initiative supports the modernisation of Pakistan's Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system under the National Registration and Biometric Policy Framework and aligns with the government's 'Uraan Pakistan' digital agenda, it says. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
TimesLIVE
05-05-2025
- Politics
- TimesLIVE
The scandal of invisibility and futures we can't see
Having succeeded in Bophuthatswana to understand problems associated with civil registration, I was able to take on legislative reforms post apartheid and in the main argue for what my survey of 1983 had shown, that most births occur in public institutions. The important move was then for births to be notified in these institutions. The law was amended to allow for this in 1998 and registration of births improved. Vital registration in South Africa has a coverage of 90% for births and 95% for deaths. And this is because of the initial investment in the changes in law in 1998. Home affairs in subsequent years mounted campaigns for registration including mobile clinics for doing so. Public policy on child support grants and school feeding schemes ensured that events are registered on time and the law moved to an enforceable 30 days. The key for development therefore is based on the drive for unique identifiers across space and time. And human beings, as agents of development, are crucial as subjects, objects and prime movers of identification and identity systems for development. As the then chair of the African Symposium for Statistical Development since 2006, I have been engrossed in among others Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS). Thus, after ensuring Africa counts in the 2010 Round of Censuses, I led a crusade that led to the ministerial conference on CRVS as a standing commitment to ensure that human identity as a source of citizenship and participation becomes an agenda central to development. I refer to these as the 'know-me' systems. Armed with such systems social, economic, environmental and political interactions are enabled and the obstacles and pain of implementing development imperatives is removed. As a statistician engrossed in standards and working nationally, continentally and globally, and now retired, I bring with me enormous wealth of knowledge, having been one of the 25 person team advising the UN secretary-general on data revolution, which is a central piece of ID systems. I have engaged in the discourse of who owns technology and the associated data. Thus I have brought to the fore the question of what the levers of development would be in an information society, including its central thesis of its political economy. The APAI-CRVS movement is a sad shadow of itself. Into this space ID4Africa and ID4D have snatched the agenda and taken centre stage while Africans slumber. The question of data sovereignty is one that Africans have to answer if they have to live up to Sachs's dream for Africa. Ebrahim Traore of Burkina Faso and his counterparts in Mali and Niger have shown Africa how to bell the cat and the geopolitics provide the wind behind Africa's sail. Africa should catch the sail on the high wave and not procrastinate, otherwise Agenda 2063 and Sachs's rendition of 2100 will be but more of the same for Africans. Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa
