By Emmanuel Mensah-Abludo
The Acting Registrar of Births and Deaths Registry, Samuel Adom Botchway, says in keeping with President Mahama’s resetting agenda that every child born in Ghana between 2024 and 2028 should have a birth certificate, the agency under his watch will do all within its power to achieve the objective. He made the commitment during his duty tour of the Upper West Region.
As part of his schedule, Mr. Botchway paid courtesy calls on the Regional Minister, Charles Lwanga Puozuing, and the Metropolitan Chief Executive, Issah Nura Danwana, inspected an office complex project which has been at the foundation level for some years, and interacted with staff of his agency. Talking about his impression of Upper West, Mr. Botchway noted that it is a lovely place to be, saying when he was down South, he had a different view of the area and urged others to also come up North to have a feel of the Region.
The visit enabled Mr. Botchway and his team to have first-hand information from staff in Upper West as well as share the vision of President Mahama on registering all newborn babies over a five-year period as well as strategise to deliver within the purview of the resetting agenda.
Challenges identified during the interaction with staff included inadequate logistics and human resources. In terms of logistics, the staff were much concerned about dysfunctional desktop computers and laptops as well as lack of means of transport, and appealed to the Acting Registrar of Births and Deaths to buy some motorbikes to help lessen the burden of moving around to carry out their duties.
The Upper West Regional Registrar of Births and Deaths, Naa Alhassan Musah, who welcomed the delegation from Accra, commended Mr. Botchway for being the third Registrar of Births and Deaths who has visited Upper West since 1989, saying the visit was a morale booster for the staff in the Region. He told the meeting that Upper West had recorded about 42% for births and 3% for deaths under the period under review.
Naa Musah pointed out that the Upper West Regional office and the Municipal/District offices have come out with a programme outline for “a vigorous mass registration” from August to September 2025. The Upper West Regional Registrar outlined inadequate staffing, an uncompleted regional office block, inadequate funding to carry out planned activities, broken-down motorbikes with some districts without any motorbikes, lack of motivation for volunteers, and network challenges in some districts as some of the issues they have had to contend with.
Mr. Botchway, for his part, emphasised the need for officers of the Registry to first capture children born at health facilities where many deliveries occur and are easier to register, and then complement it with births recorded outside health facilities [in the communities]. On the motorbikes, the Acting Registrar announced that his outfit is working in collaboration with the Common Fund Administrator and Ghana Statistical Service to acquire some motorbikes to help improve the mobility of staff of the Registry in their line of duty.
Mr. Botchway said he will liaise with the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) to get some state-of-the-art desktop computers to surmount the challenges pertaining to dysfunctional computers. Mr. Botchway expressed appreciation to Mr. Puozuing for his assurance to support the Births and Deaths Registry in Upper West.
The Director in charge of Statistics, Madam Constance Anane, who gave an overview of birth statistics from the various districts and municipalities in Upper West, said the Region was able to record 41.9% of expected births in its catchment area. She therefore appealed to the workers to redouble their efforts by collaborating to increase births and deaths data capturing by making use of proxy registration.
The Head of Projects, National Office, Emmanuel Nortey Botchway, admonished staff to see to it that every certificate they issue should be entered into the electronic database. The move, he noted, is to forestall situations where birth certificates have been issued but when it comes to verification, they cannot be traced in the system.
The Head of Projects also charged staff to ensure that they religiously carry out the operation “zero-unregistered child from health facilities.”
