President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will on Wednesday, 8th November 2023, launch the electronic Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System (CRVS) and the Geospatial Data Repository. CRVS as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) is a system that registers all births and deaths, issues birth and death certificates, and compiles and disseminates vital statistics, including cause of death information. It also records marriages and divorces. This was made known by the Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Nasir Kwarra, at a pre-launch briefing on Monday, November 6, 2023, in Abuja.
The chairman stated that the commission, in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), developed the e-CRVS Operational Readiness Assessment Report which showed the potential of digital technologies in providing transformative outcomes in CRVS and integrating data from multiple systems to securely store data at scale, in a cost-effective way in Nigeria.
“As it is the tradition with the Commission, it has become imperative to start this very important epoch-making event with a press briefing to among other things apprise members of the press and the general public of the newly introduced transformative and digitized process and its importance to the civil registration and vital statistics process in our dear country.
“Being the veritable organ for information dissemination and moulding of public opinion, it is our hope that the media will be in the vanguard of the efforts to inform and educate the general populace on the essence and importance of this new electronic Civil Registration and Vital Registration System as well as the Geospatial repository database and its link to the ECVRS.
“During the Sixth Session of Conference of African Ministers responsible for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CVRS) held at the United Nations Conference Centre in Addis Ababa from 24th to 27th October 2022, African Ministers made several resolutions and encouraged all countries in the continent to automate the CRVS process and ensure the implementation of the United Nations Legal Identity Agenda. Member States were further encouraged to develop an electronic technology driven system to boost data generation and civil statistics.
“As part of Nigeria’s way of complying with the resolutions of the African Ministers and scaling up the automated process in Nigeria, the National Population Commission in collaboration with UNICEF developed the eCRVS Operational Readiness Assessment Report showing the potential of digital technologies in providing transformative outcomes in CRVS and integrating data from multiple systems to securely store data at scale, in a cost-effective way in Nigeria.
“The report ushered in the bold step taken by the Commission for a transformative innovation of the eCRVS (Vital Reg) system by developing a Public Private Partnership arrangement between the Commission and Barnksforte Technologies Limited," he added.
“The PPP arrangement is to promote the Vital Reg System as a completely electronic system that digitalizes all civil registrations such as birth registration, stillbirth registration, birth attestation, adoption, marriage notification, divorce notification, migration and death.’’
