A proposal to allow health facilities to register births and deaths should be approached with caution in order to avoid costly mistakes, Members of Parliament have said.

Members of the parliamentary Standing Committee on Political Affairs and Gender Equality expressed their concern on Monday during a session in which they were scrutinising the draft law modifying and complementing the 2016 law governing persons and family.

The amendment intends to change the current situation where civil registration is only done by a civil registrar based at sector level or at Rwanda’s embassies abroad.

If successful, the amendment will pave the way for health centres to have an officer authorised to register births and deaths.

Consequently, the civil registrar at the health centre will have the right to issue birth or death certificates.

The MPs argue that some women, mainly teen mothers, give birth but the fathers to their newborns are not identified.

With this, they argue, there is a likelihood of contested fatherhood.

MP Euthalie Nyirabega said that, while the initiative to have an IT enabled integrated civil registration system is a commendable development, its implementation process should be carefully thought through to avoid mismanagement.

"The health facility will register any information that one tells them because they don’t have any other reference such as village or cell leadership to provide information,” Nyirabega said. "What worries me is that we might record inaccurate data in the registers at health facilities because the person who will be registering civil status at the health facility has no way to verify whether the information they were told is true.”

She suggested that the sector leadership should be linked to the civil registration at health facilities to help ensure that civil status-related information being provided by a parent is accurate.

Those who are pushing for the amendment of the current law argue that the number of children being born in health centres is on the rise yet the number of children registered in the civil status registers remains low.

Thus, they argue, that the move will boost the number of births and deaths registered and promote evidence-based planning for the population.

In the 2018/19 fiscal year, some 332,000 babies were born from health facilities, according to information from the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda.

Josephine Mukesha, the Director-General of National Identification Agency (NIDA), said that the proposed amendment is an enabler for digital integrated registration system which will be providing authorised institutions with access to vital statistics.

She explained that the proposed system will produce watermarked birth certificates, which can be kept electronically or in the physical registry.

"If a doctor has assisted the mother to give birth, why don’t you give them the authority to register that birth while they can attest that the mother gave birth to this baby?” she questioned.

However, she said that the gap can be identified if there is a single mother who has given birth.

"We are not moving the recognition [of a baby] to the health facility. So, if it’s a single mother, the baby will be registered under the mother only. But when the father goes to recognise the baby, the recognition is another civil act that is done according to the laws. It will be done at the sector level,” she said.

editor@newtimesrwanda.com