27 Oct 2013

The country needs reliable and accurate Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) data for proper development planning and informed decision making, says the acting statistian general, Mr Dabilani Buthali.

Officially launching the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs CRVS tool in Gaborone recently, Mr Buthali said a successful assessment and a good action plan would ensure timely generation of statistical data that would benefit the country in better planning and delivery of programming.

He said the assessment was a response to the call for countries to conduct in depth studies on the status of their CRVS and to develop action plans with a view to accelerating improvements in CRVS.

Mr Buthali said government was committed to accounting for all Batswana including the vulnerable groups and those in hard to reach areas as well as Batswana in the Diaspora.

“We cannot afford to have anyone not registered or accounted for as we risk relegating our people to ‘the scandal of invisibility’ whereby people are born and die without having been formally recognised or acknowledged by state,” he said.

He said comprehensive assessment presented yet another opportunity for Botswana to have a seamless collaboration among stakeholders. He said their aim was to have an equally seamless, mainstreamed and costed strategic action plan that would take civil registration and vital statistics to great heights.

Mr Buthali added that the action plan should show innovativeness and reflect communal resource pooling and unity of effort in implementation in order to achieve a high impact in accelerating improvements in civil registration.

He noted that it would go a long way in easing current challenges such as over dependence on time bound periodical census and surveys that come at a huge cost to the government in terms of time, human resources and finances.

Mr Buthali also noted that CRVS and national registration were the life blood for service provision for both public and private sector services through positive identification and authentication of the identity of persons.
ENDS