Decentralization of registration services still poor – Nyamurinda

The Coordinator of the National Identity Card Project, Pascal Nyamurinda has revealed that decentralization of registration services is still poor, despite efforts to avail data collection mechanisms at district levels. This revelation comes in response to various reports that local government officials do not inform the public of the specific time when identity card services such as data captioning and identity card collection are done. “Actually, data collection for the production of national identity cards should be regular – at least once a week. It is however unfortunate that most of the time, local government officials may be unable provide these services at any given time given their kind of work load. “It is not right that anyone should fail to access the services since registration is a continuous process. To avoid such loopholes in the decentralization process, officials must therefore, provide a clear calendar of service provision,” Nyamurinda told The New Times. With regard to slow-pace of the decentralisation of ID services, the he noted that the government is doing whatever it takes to ensure quick decentralisation of all services. “Recently, we held some discussions with the Minister for Local government and agreed to work out ways of improving the civil registration process. Although we have about 5 percent failure, Rwanda is still exemplary to the rest of Africa with regard to service decentralisation,” he added. According to Nyamurinda, so far, the country is successful at marital, divorce, birth, death, property and identity card registrations among many. He recently said that smart cards – a system that is set to integrate the services such as insurance, banking, medical and immigration among others will be introduced by next year as well. “This move will enable all institutions involved to offer services quickly as it will be easy to identify citizens with reference to the national data base,” he was once told The New Times. The ID Project is set to become an institution in a bid to ensure sustainability of these services. Ends