Governance Out of a Box Project Partners Meet in Liberia

On May 26^th and 27^th, CMI met with representatives from Nokia’s software development and corporate social investment sections in Monrovia. Nokia is cooperating with CMI on the Governance Out of a Box project that aims to create a mobile-based birth registration system in Liberia. The company is providing the Ministry of Health with the Nokia Data Gathering (NDG) platform, which enables easy gathering, in this case, of birth data.

CMI, together with representatives from the Ministry of Health, lead a Nokia visit to Bomi County, the pilot County for the project. The group visited the Bomi County Registrar's office as well as Beafine Clinic in Senjeh District, Bomi County, a health care center that is currently visited regularly by the District Health Officer Yei Magbinne who uses the NDG mobile solution as a way to document new births.  In addition to the visit, CMI organized a seminar where Nokia’s representatives met with members of the Ministry of Health, other representatives from Ministry and Agency which are currently developing registry systems, and various IT-firms based in Liberia, who could potentially support the development of integrated solutions. The representatives held discussions on how these efforts could be better coordinated and how to strengthen intergovernmental and private-sector collaboration.

Mobile birth registration is already being used in Bomi County (although initial testing was also done in two other counties) and it is expected that the practice will be adopted in all 15 counties by the end of 2012. Currently most of the information is housed in a central database in the capital and mobile birth registration assists with the decentralization of the birth registration system in the country, since now all counties can access the data locally and print certificates right in the counties.  NDG facilitates the creation of an electronic database instead of the current paper-based one. It is hoped that this will make the process of registering new births less tedious for the citizens. Birth registration and the issuing of birth certificates is one of the most basic services a state is expected to offer its citizens. It enables the participation in a country’s democracy, identification and, for example, children’s enrollment in schools.

The Ministry values this effort highly and is supportive in seeing it succeed.  As the Deputy Minister for Health and Vital Statistics, Minister S. T. Varpilah said in discussions with CMI, "we have been very happy with the results so far, and hope for continued collaboration.”

For more photos of the visit, see: http://bit.ly/ksN0fV

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