Mobile birth registration

Tigo Tanzania in partnership with RITA (Registration Insolvency & Trusteeship Agency) and UNICEF is jointly supporting new national birth registration initiative set to massively accelerate the number of children under the age of five with birth certificates. The new birth registration system is using innovative mobile application developed by Tigo.

The mobile phone simplifies the process of birth registration by entering the registration information into a mobile phone which sends the data to a central database at RITA in real time. The application is designed to work on all models of mobile phones and operating systems.

Recently approved Sustainable Development Goals explicitly express the importance of registering every child at birth. According to Tanzania Demographic Health Survey (DHS) conducted in 2010, only 16 percent of children under the age of five have been registered with civil authorities, of whom only 6 percent had received birth certificates. Therefore this initiative aims at addressing this challenge by accelerating child birth registration and establishing an effective birth and civil registration system.

So far, the new system is a major success. In the regions where it has been rolled out – Mbeya, Mwanza, Iringa and Njombe – more than 660,000 children under five have been registered. In the next four years the system will be scaled to an additional ten regions to replicate this success. This will cover almost half of Tanzania’s 31 regions, with the potential to reach approximately 4 million children under the age of five.

This innovation has come at an opportune time where mobile solutions are paramount instrument in development specifically in Tanzania leveraging on the 71% penetration of mobile phones.