Mobile Solution for Birth Registration in Liberia: A Case Study of Using ICT in Statebuilding

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) plays an essential role in today’s public administration. Countries, which are in the phase of recovering from conflicts and reinstating key functions of state administration, benefit from the utilization of ICT in order to offer services more quickly and efficiently to their citizens. This case study describes and discusses an ICT based solution Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) and the Liberia Ministry of Health and Social Welfare have developed with a view to supporting the State to strengthen its capacities in service delivery and thereby strengthen peace in the society. The solution is developed to support the reinstating of one central public service, birth registration, by developing a solution which addresses the need to access, collect, transfer, and store Birth Registration (BR) data with smartphones to complement a parallel process of using paper forms. The birth registration data is transferred by using the existing mobile networks. The case study describes why this solution was selected in a country where mobile networks cover pretty much the entire country and landline infrastructure does not exist. The case study describes how the project takes into consideration the fact that other key functions of the state will confront similar kind of challenges and, therefore a more generic approach can be developed based on the results and lessons learnt of the BR project. This observation then raises an important question how to support post conflict states in a structured way to set up public services to optimize use of their limited resources and time. This paper concentrates on demonstrating the mobile solutions for the birth registration process in Liberia and how the Liberia case can yield valuable input for CMI to further develop its framework theory for post conflict statebuilding.