Society

KOICA, GIZ offer computers to BUNEC to boost civil status registration.

Stakeholders with donated equipment

The National Civil Status Registration Office, better known by its French acronym BUNEC, has received a generous donation of computers, television screens, printers, storage devices and other office equipment.
The items were offered BUNEC by the German Cooperation, GIZ, and the Korean International Cooperation Agency, KOICA.

The donation was made as part of a support programme to modernise civil status registration in Cameroon. The project which is in the second phase is dubbed PAMEC II.

The items were handed over recently in Yaounde to BUNEC’s Deputy Director, Abdoulaye Adjiali Boukar. This was during a ceremony held at BUNEC’s headquarters.

The equipment will help the body facilitate the digitalisation of civil status registration processes as well as the preservation and conservation of data through digital archiving.

While receiving the items, Adjiali Boukar expressed gratitude to the donors and pointed out that their support will help in completely equipping BUNEC’s Data Centre, making it efficient and user-friendly as it will ease locating and accessing files.

He added that the centre will now be able to centralise all national computer data on civil status in the country, and through interoperability with health services, data from the Ministry of Health will be automatically synchronised to the Data Center.

BUNEC Deputy Director shaking hands with GIZ Head of Projects

Enter programme initiators

On their parts, the Resident Representative of KOICA Cameroon, Sangchul Kim, and the Head of Projects for GIZ Cameroon, Wim Dekkers, expressed satisfaction with PAMEC II which came to an end in March.

They pointed out that PAMEC II was implemented in four regions of the country including the North, West, South and South West to modernise civil status registries in 20 municipalities.

They said out of the 20 municipalities involved in the project, only four had benefited from the installation of equipment to computerise their civil status registration processes.

“The equipment we just handed over is to equip the remaining 16 municipalities and to boost the tech infrastructure at BUNEC’s General Management,” Wim Dekkers said.

The councils that have benefited from PAMEC II will use the equipment to digitise their archives and update their available data to BUNEC’s central Data Center.

“We are happy with the work that we have done to help Cameroon develop a modern and efficient civil status registry system. We started by training officials on how to use digital equipment and software and now we have handed over these items to complete the training. Our hope is that this donation will facilitate the commencement of phase three of the program which seeks to digitalize all civil status registries in the country,” Wim Dekkers revealed.

According to Adjiali Boukar, BUNEC has as goal to modernise all 432 civil status registry centers in the country, among them 374 on the national territory and 58 in diplomatic missions and consular posts.

“We hope that the activities of PAMEC III begin soon, to help us achieve this goal,” Adjiali Boukar concluded.

This story was first published in The Guardian Post Issues No:3140 of Thursday June 13, 2024