Health Workers & NCRA Staff Received Training on New Mobile App for Births & Deaths Registration

By: Alusine Rehme Wilson

Health Workers from the North, North West including the Western Rural and Urban Area districts and NCRA Staff has on Friday, December 4, 2020 received training from the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) on the authority’s newly developed mobile registration application, at the Bombali District Council hall in Makeni.

Supported by the Government of Sierra Leone and UNICEF, the day’s training of trainers according to Roselyn Massaquoi, the Training and Capacity Manager at NCRA is meant to build the capacity of NCRA Staff and Health Workers on the newly developed NCRA mobile application that will be used to register all births and deaths geared towards minimizing the paper registration at health centers in the country.

“The training targets 200 trainers comprising of NCRA Staff and Health Workers stationed in all sixteen districts of Sierra Leone. They will in turn train community health workers at districts level which will grossly improve the registration of births and deaths since NCRA staff doesn’t perform delivery.

“We’ve established a very cordial relationship with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation over the years and with the introduction of the NCRA Births and Deaths Mobile Application, nationwide, Registers will now be able to accurately record all births and deaths taking place in any of the over 1,400 Peripheral Health Units, she told this medium in an interview.

Mrs. Massaquoi added that, the new mobile application registration system is in line with the provisions of the recent Data Protection Bill which primes protection of Registrants Data. And at NCRA we pride ourselves to uphold confidentiality and our registrars will record personal data of every registrant such as the name of PHU where the event is recorded, chiefdom, district, place of birth, date of birth, address, age, the names of registrant’s parents and a unique National Identification Number (NIN) will be issued to every registrant.

Conclusively, she assured the general public to comply with all National Civil Registrars and Health workers by providing their accurate information during every registration process and for parents and guardians to ensure to register every birth within the first three months to avoid paying late registration fees when seeking for birth certificates at a later date.

Speaking on behalf of other trainees, Amadu Kamara, the Social Mobilization Officer-II at the Bombali District Health Management Team expressed satisfaction for participating is such training alongside other health workers from various districts in the country, which he says will help to remedy the challenge of mass number of unrecorded births and deaths they usually experience.

“The numerous indicators in the mobile application such as cause of death and other personal data will not only ease our work but will also help us to track the number of maternal deaths, mortality deaths and aged deaths as well as help NCRA generate quality data of every registrant with just a click,” he told this writer.