Ministry to register cemeteries

Accra, Aug. 25, GNA - Mr Kofi Poku-Adusei, Deputy Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment, on Friday said the Ministry would soon register all public and private cemeteries to enable it to have accurate death registration records.

He said the registration, which would be conducted and controlled by the district assemblies, would discourage the non-registration of deaths and the indiscriminate interment of corpses currently being practised.

Briefing the press in Accra to announce the celebration of "Third Births and Deaths Registration Day" on September one, Mr Poku-Adusei said the rate of death registration was very low and did not help in finding the causes of deaths.

The first September of every year has been set aside to celebrate births and deaths registration and this year's celebration would be held in Atronie in the Brong Ahafo Region.

The day, under the theme; "Births and Deaths Registration, a tool for National Development Planning" would register births and deaths free of charge as a means to achieve the universal births and deaths registration target.

Mr Opoku-Adusei noted that though death registrations facilitated the calculation of demographic indices such as infant, child and maternal mortality, it was also important for the health sector to investigate into causes of deaths and initiate measures to contain any epidemic.

The Births and Deaths Registry established in 1965 after the enactment of the Births and Deaths Registration Act 301 makes the registration of births and deaths compulsory and for parents to register their children immediately after birth.

This, he explained, gave legal recognition and identity to such children adding: "Children or anybody, who is not registered, is not legally recognised by the State and for that matter not a citizen of this country."

He noted that following a series of programmes and interventions in 2003, births registration coverage had increased from 28 per cent in 2003 to 67 per cent in 2005 while death registration had also moved slightly from 23 per cent in 2003 to 24 per cent in 2005 Mr Opouku-Adusei said births and deaths registration was vital in the development planning of every nation and facilitated in the provision of infrastructure amenities and failure of such data hampered the successful implementation of many important programmes. He noted that the Registry's computerization programme would as from January 2007 be printed directly from the database that was being created.

"These certificates will have added security features that would make them impossible to be duplicated, reproduced, forged or altered", he said.

Mr Opoku-Adusei called on Ghanaians to take opportunity created and report all births and deaths for the successful execution of National Identification System and to help to generate relevant demographic parameters required for national development planning.

Mrs Oboshie Sai-Coffie, Deputy Minister of Information and National Orientation, pledged the Ministry's support for the campaign by providing information vans and personnel for all the local languages.