NID processes to be reviewed

 National Identification project director Dickson Kiragi has assured that their processes were being reviewed to determine a cost-effective approach in delivering the registration component of the programme.

He said the National Identification  project, which was established in 2013, would embark on a new strategy early this year to cut back on costs and delivery time as the current processes were cumbersome. 

Although Kiragi did not reveal how much money has been spent on more than 120,000 registrations so far in the past seven months, he said,like any other exercise on gathering population information, the cost was “excessive”.

“We have learned this from our colleagues at the Electoral Commission and NSO (National Statistical Office),” Kiragi said.

“However, this is a figure that we a really trying to establish but we want to make this a cost-effective registration process so I can’t disclose an exact figure as yet until we have really analysed the cost of registration.

“From the current approach, the cost of registering one person is what we really need to establish in reality. 

“That should determine the cost of registering a population within a ward, district or province and that should really be able to tell us the actual cost of registrations.”

He said the current budget they had was allocated for fixed office establishments, awareness, publicity and other infrastructure development essential to the national identificiation project.

“I am not able to give the actual cost of each of these components but once we do our new strategy, we will know exactly what our costs are like,” he said. 

“The new strategy is ready and all we need to do is run this by with our minister and the secretary (for National Planning), hopefully before the end of this week.”

He said the new strategy would eliminate inefficiencies in the current process and reform the manner in which registrations were handled, resulting in a reduction in cost and the time it took to deliver National identification cards. 

The project was initiated by the Government in 2013 to address the problem of non-participation of many citizens in the 2012 national election and because of the lack of a centralised database to guide policy formulation and development of government programmes.  The project is a public sector reform activity under the priority impact programs as outlined in the Alotau Accord.