Technology Driving Gains in Birth Registration Process

Technology is contributing significantly to the impressive gains made in the birth registration process at the Registrar General’s Department (RGD), even though there have been many modifications over the years.

The compulsory registration of all birth, marriage, stillbirth and death records was introduced in Jamaica in 1878, followed a year later by the establishment of the Registrar General’s Department (RGD), Jamaica’s only repository for recording these vital events.

Prior to and post Jamaica’s Independence, registration was carried out primarily through a network of Local District Registrars (LDRs) who were responsible for manually recording births in their own districts and submitting copies of those records to the RGD.

To assist with the process, Parish officers would collect and deliver original registrations to the RGD that would secure them in a fireproof vault at its head office in Twickenham Park, Spanish Town.

Duplicate records were also collected and stored in a secured vault offsite.

The records are kept on shelves in acid-free containers in the vaults which has temperature control, air conditioning, and a fire suppression system. The record vaults are also equipped with security cameras and are secured by combination locks which require dual access.

Each LDR has an alpha code that is prefixed to every registration number given at the time of birth, the numbering being sequential. Additionally, each parish was divided into registration districts, with their own Registrar.

The first letter of the alpha code refers to the parish, while the second letter represents a local LDR within the parish. These letters, when combined, form the LDR’s identifier.

Production Manager at the RGD, Desmond Davis, who has been with the entity for over two decades, says he has seen numerous changes in the registration process, one of the most significant of which is how registration is done.

He shares that the RGD had numerous LDR centres situated in different parts of each parish, where persons would go to register their children.

Mr. Davis notes that in earlier years, “if the time came for a mother to give birth and she is not in her parish of origin, while she could visit the nearest hospital or birthing centre to have the baby, she would still have to go back to the LDR in the parish that she is originally from to receive a certificate of registry for the child.”

For her part, Parish Officer with responsibility for supervising LDRs in St. Catherine, Beulah Thomas, says if the baby was delivered at home by a midwife, “a notification of birth will be given to the mother to take with her to conduct the registration within her parish.”

Ms. Thomas notes that while there is still a small percentage of home births, “whenever they [LDRs] are doing those registrations, an identification card for the mother and a letter from a Justice of the Peace confirming the evidence of birth, have to be presented to the LDR in the parish, regardless of the LDR having [previous] knowledge of the birth”.

However, with the advancement of technology, the RGD has improved its registration process.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the RGD, Charlton McFarlane, says that many of the technological innovations of today did not exist when the RGD was founded in 1879 and as such, the entity is making use of technology to enhance its service delivery.

Gone are the days when the entity had to photocopy, stamp and seal records for customers. Since May 2001, the information is entered into the RGD’s birth registration system and a computer-generated certificate is issued to the customer.

“No longer do we issue birth certificates on paper written on with a pen; we now issue what is called a computer-generated certificate that is printed on security paper, which minimises a person’s ability to change the information on the certificate,” Mr. McFarlane outlines.

He adds that the introduction of security paper into the RGD’s processes has significantly reduced its susceptibility to fraud.

Among the improvements, the agency also implemented its Application Tracking System in 2003, which is used internally by staff members to track customer applications from submission to production and delivery. The tracking system, so far, has assisted the entity in becoming more efficient at what it does and can be accessed from any RGD location.

Citing an example, Mr. Davis indicates that if a person comes to the RGD to enquire about an application and does not have their birth entry number on hand, “we can search for the number electronically in our system, whereas in years gone by, we had what was referred to as indices … these [entry numbers] were manually entered into a book, and we had to look through the index to find the numbers”.

“Furthermore, these books are located in one area and so someone from the RGD would have to go to the physical location to retrieve the information, but now we have a computer system that is accessible to every customer service representative,” the Production Manager explains.

Later in 2007, the childbirth bedside registration programme, which facilitates the early registration of babies born within birthing centres and hospitals, was implemented to further strengthen the registration process.

The programme was launched to fill the gap in the registration coverage for births, which was less than 80 per cent at the time. This was due to parents leaving hospitals and raising their children without registering them.

Not only has there been improvements in tracking an application, registering births, and producing certificates, but the entity has also begun to digitise its records.

The process started in 2014 with 12 computers located in a small room at the RGD’s Portmore branch, where paper records were scanned and indexed.

The CEO reports that to date, the entity has digitised 3,750,000 records, approximately 35 per cent of birth records. Since its inception, the agency has amassed well over 7,000,000 records.

Earlier this year, a contract was signed between the National Identification System (NIDS) project and a private service provider, taking the digitisation process one step further. The contract was signed to digitise the remaining birth records. Death and marriage records will also be digitised as part of the contract.

The agency hopes that the remaining records will be fully digitised by 2024.