The Upper East Regional Directorate of the Births and Deaths is appealing to the government for financial clearance to recruit more personnel to augment the understaffed department to effectively discharge its mandate.
The region recorded 29,716 births and 306 deaths in 2020 but the directorate, says, inadequate logistics and low staff numbers remain a major challenge affecting productivity.
The directorate disclosed this during a handing over ceremony of motorbikes by the government to eight (8) out of fifteen (15) municipal and district registration officers in the Upper East Region.
Speaking to Citi News, the Upper East Regional Registration officer, Mr. John Yalmon commended government for addressing part of their logistics constraints but bemoaned the low staffing of the department as a challenge in achieving universal birth registration coverage that needs to be addressed.
“The climate situation makes it difficult for officers to move. There are places where it is inaccessible and when it’s rainy season my staff find it difficult to reach these areas. Another challenge is the naming of children because the delay in the naming of children by parents posed a serious challenge to officers who have to continually visit the family to get the child registered.”
“Another problem is, every district or municipal have only one registration officer, how will the officer cover the entire area so, we hope the provision of these motorbikes will help solve the problem of covering distance…We are appealing to government to recruit more personnel because as we speak out of the 15 districts and municipalities and our staff strength as at now are 12 leaving the other 3 districts,” he said.
“We also have registries which are supposed to be manned by a qualified staff which we slack. So, we are appealing to the government to ensure that births and deaths get the requisite staff so that, the registration can go on smoothly”.
Some beneficiaries of the motorbikes lauded the government for the intervention, adding that, it will help improve their work.
The Navrongo municipal registration officer, Mr. Joseph Adams, said, “Registration coverage in some communities has been a problem to us. For communities like; Naaga, Chaba, Yua among others, going to do registration was difficult, and we were not able to cover a lot but with these motorbikes given us, we will be able to cover more births registration this year”.
Another Registration officer for Kassena-Nankana West District, Mr. Sukairazu Inusah, added that, “Before these motorbikes, we were challenged as far as registration is concerned because some of our communities are very far and have a deplorable road network and as a district registration officer without using these urban motorbikes you cannot go there but with these new motorbikes we can now reach these areas to register every one.”