Governance out of a Box – Population Registration in Liberia

Description What is done in the programme or project and why, what results are pursued, who benefits from the activities and who are involved in the implementation.

This application builds on the initial project for GooB which received support for 2009 to 2011 and seeks additional funding for only 1 year. The overall objective of the project is to improve the governance capacity of countries recovering from crisis, and the Government of Liberia in particular, by identifying tools and generic criteria for reinstating key functions of civil administration in post conflict environments, thereby building a stable base for transparent, effective and inclusive administrative processes and furthermore ensuring a successful transition from post-war reconstruction to long term development. The focus of this application will be to strengthen government ownership and decentralization. While data collection and entry process at the local level are in principle functioning, local Ministry staff needs additional training, process clarification and support to ensure the sustainability of the birth registration process. Now that tools are in place given successful implementation of the initial GooB project, this can be accomplished by strengthening the information management, monitoring, and reporting capacity of the MoH duty bearers for UBR. Secondly, now that a Liberia National Registry office has just recently been signed into law and a Board appointed in April 2012, the continuation of this project seeks to focus more strongly on supporting advocacy for integration of relevant population related processes by facilitating dialogue with relevant policy level decision makers. This will be complimented by community level studies and awareness raising dialogue activities. Lastly, we will take a more in-depth look at the issues of regional migration, resettlement, reintegration, identity, and citizenship, in relation to conflicts, and how these must be taken into account when establishing population registry systems for development. This review, which will be facilitated by regional seminars, will serve to present more evidence based analysis and documentation of an informed and carefully planned process of establishing a model for population registration in a post conflict environment which can then be presented at the close of the project for validation.