RGD Outreach Programmes Yield Hundreds of Applications

The Registrar General’s Department (RGD) received more than 1,500 overseas applications last year and was able to satisfy 98 per cent of them.
Registrar General and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the RGD, Dr. Patricia Holness, informed Jamaicans living in Toronto, that many of those which were not fulfilled was because of incorrect information given on the application and at least 20 were sent with no return addresses.
“On the application, people wrote ‘at home’ instead of putting their addresses and so when the certificates were completed and ready to be sent there were no addresses to send them to,” explained the Registrar General.
Dr. Holness was speaking at the latest overseas outreach conducted by the RGD team in Toronto, Canada, from December 13 to 17, as part of the company’s Mobile Outreach Programme.
Jamaicans were able to visit several locations in and around Toronto and apply for birth, marriage and death certificates; add father’s particulars, did correction of error, late entry of name and late registration. The RGD team also provided the birth entry number for those clients who needed it to complete the application process.
Between April and November of this year, the RGD conducted some 700 outreach visits, all across Jamaica and also in the United States.
Dr. Holness gave an update on the work of the RGD, informing that since January 1, 2007, all children born and fully registered were receiving the first copy of their birth certificate free of cost.
“As of November 2007, over 25,000 birth certificates have been printed and delivered,” said Dr. Holness.She also informed that the error rate in the processing of birth, marriage and death certificates, was now less than one per cent and that clients could pay online for those certificates.
The Canadian customers were surprised to hear some little known facts about the RGD, such as the agency having 70 million records going back to the 1660s; on a daily basis, the website gets over 2,000 visits; the agency receives more than 500 e-mails and operates for 23 hours per day.
For the future, the CEO said clients would be able to do online verification of information. The next overseas outreach is slated for the United Kingdom in February 2008.