Mobile Solution for Birth Registration in Liberia: A Case Study of Using ICT in Statebuilding

Why Don’t You Register Your Child? A Study of Attitudes and Factors Affecting Birth Registration in Kenya, and Policy Suggestions

“…Another way this could be accomplished is with the use of recent advances in mobile technology. Developing regions, especially in Africa, have seen many recent applications of community-based applications of ICT, for the purpose of community health, banking and sharing of economic information (Kaplan, 2006;Mitchell et al, 2009;Ngugi et al, 2010;Prasad, Dixit, Van Nee, & Ojanpera, 2011;Virhiä, Roberts, Itälä, & Varpilah, 2010). Several initiatives have used mobile phones and digitised forms, to quickly record community information at the most remote rural levels (Lang, 2011;Tomlinson et al, 2009).…”

Decentralised Governance: Crafting Effective Democracies Around the World

“…It was recognised that every child had a right to be registered and efforts were made by the government to ensure that the country had a well-functioning and sustainable CR system. The process of birth registration was centrally managed by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) from offices in the capital city, Monrovia (Virhiä et al 2010). This centrally controlled process proved very inefficient because most of the citizens found it difficult to travel to the capital city to register a child's birth.…”

“…Although easy to implement, this paper-based decentralisation had several drawbacks including the possible loss of information through the manual handling of forms, the difficulty of interpreting handwritten information among third parties, and the need to transfer information from paper-based forms to a digital database. These issues often created huge pressure on the central office personnel, leading to long delays in the registration process (Virhiä et al 2010).…”

“…A mobile birth registration (MBR) project was launched in 2009 as part of the Liberian government's Crisis Management Initiative, to complement the manual registration process (Virhiä et al 2010;Toivanen et al 2011). The MBR was designed to facilitate the collection of birth registration data in rural communities, minimise the need for households to travel long distances to provide registration information, and reduce the issuing time for birth certificates.…”