The government plans to expand its digital birth notification system to hospitals contracted by the Social Health Authority (SHA) within the next three months.Immigration and Citizen Services Principal Secretary Belio Kipsang said on Tuesday, October 6, that the Interior Ministry was finalising talks with the Ministry of Health to integrate the civil registration system with hospital management systems.Kipsang said the expansion is expected to be completed by December and will allow parents whose children are born in SHA-contracted hospitals to benefit from the electronic birth notification (e-notification) system.“We already finalised our engagement with the Ministry of Health, and we shall be rolling out across all our hospitals that benefit from the SHA. So everybody who benefits from SHA will be benefiting from the process of E-notification,” Kipsang stated."Within the next three months, we shall be able to roll out this system across all our officials who benefit from SHA," he added.The move will replace the physical birth notification that has been traditionally used when obtaining birth certificates with a digital notification dubbed E-notification, in a move expected to make it easier for parents to register newborns and obtain civil registration documents.On many occasions, parents have raised concerns over misplacing the physical birth notification, asking Huduma Kenya if there are ways to get the critical birth document without the notification.The development is expected to reduce reliance on manual processes in birth registration by allowing information captured at health facilities to be shared digitally with civil registration authorities.The rollout, the PS said, would also enable children to receive a Unique Personal Identifier (UPI), which is intended to provide a common identifier that can be used across government systems.The UPI system is being integrated with other government databases, including education and civil registration records, as part of efforts to create a more connected digital identity system.The ministry is already working with the Ministry of Education to clean and digitise student records before transitioning them to the UPI system.According to Kipsang, once students are linked to the UPI system, they will eventually be able to access their birth certificates digitally."Once they have the UPI, they can download and print their birth certificates for themselves," he said.
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