AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE Registration Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency (RITA), in collaborations with other stakeholders, plans to put in place effective strategies to register and issue birth certificates to under five children in border regions.
RITA Chief Executive Officer Emmy Hudson said the main aim was to ensure all Tanzanians especially under five children were issued with birth certificates in future.
She was speaking during a two-day conference held in Arusha Region with various stakeholders from the President’s Office, Prime Minister’s Office (Regional Administration and Local Government), the Department of Immigration, the National Identification Authority (NIDA) as well as representatives from some regions implementing a Children’s Registration Programme.
“RITA continues implementing the under-five children registration programme to all regions, including border regions in the country. We want to ensure the programme is implemented in border regions.”
“We collaborate with key stakeholders of human and statistical events registration and cognitive issues and agreed to work together to implement our plans for the benefit of Tanzanian and nation in large.”
According to her, the programme has already been implemented in some regions in the country after which it will be implemented in other regions – Arusha, Manyara, Kigoma, Kagera, Katavi, Rukwa and Tabora.
Ms Hudson said the government had made improvements in the registration system by developing a strategy for the registration of important human events which has been implemented through the under-five registration programme.
She noted that the programme also had so far been implemented in 18 regions and had shown great success in enrolling more than 5 million children and increasing the number of registered children in the country from 13 to 49 per cent.
Ms Hudson added that due to various improvements, it had also enabled RITA to get timely data through a technological system and they were proud that they had started connecting the system to other institutions of registration and identification of citizens, thus facilitating information exchange.
Social Welfare Assistant Director from the President’s Office (Regional Administration and Local Government) Rashid Maftah commended RITA for enabling citizens to access their services timely, saying it was important for planning their development.
He added that his office was working closely with RITA in the implementation of the children’s registration programme, thus enabling an increase in the number of registered children in the country.
NIDA Identification and Registration Manager Julien Mafuru noted that in many areas citizens were already registered with national identification so RITA and other institutions could use available information to identify the parents of children who would be registered.
RITA is implementing the under-five child registration programme in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the government of Canada and TIGO.
