The National Identification Authority (NIA) has enrolled 15,549,242 people onto the National Identification System (NIS) at the end of its series of registration exercises for Ghana Card over the last three years.
Comprising 8,268,429 females and 7,280,813 males, the Ashanti Region topped the regional chart with 3,016,319 registrants where the Ahafo Region recorded the least of 270,172 people.
The NIA Executive Secretary, Professor Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, who disclosed these at a press conference in Accra, yesterday, said processes were underway to enable the use of the cards for banking and other transactions.
The NIA, in May 2017, started the NIS revamping project which aimed to compile a national database of Ghanaians living in the country and abroad as well as legal and permanent resident non-Ghanaian nationals.
Guided by the National Identity Register (Amendment) Act, 2017 (Act 950), mass registration of persons above 15 years started from April, 2019 to June 2020 followed by a mop-up that ended on September 11, 2020.
Of the 15million enrollment, Prof. Attafuah said, 14,689,672 cards had been printed; 13,848,697 issued; 840,974 printed but not issued with a backlog of 859,570 to be printed.
Giving the regional breakdown, he said, Greater Accra, had the second highest registrants of 2,970,391 followed by Eastern, 1,670,262; Central 1,566,890; Western, 1,175,058; Northern, 801,132 and Volta, 781,346.
He said Bono had 553,392; Bono East, 498,243, Upper East , 492,614; Western North, 489,035; Oti, 395,776; Upper West , 319,515; Savannah , 272, 260; North East 271,826 while 4,534 were captured under the wrong centre.
Persons with disabilities were 75,874; persons above 60 years, 1, 382,134; persons between 18 to 60 years, 13,251,803 while farmers led the top 10 occupations with 3,183,545 registrants.
Students were 2,707,952 while the registration captured 905,523 unemployed persons and 328,940 retirees with single men and women above 18 years being 5.8 million.
According to Prof. Attafuah, NIA would set up regional and district offices nationwide to, among other things, issue the 1,700,544 remaining cards, handle application for registration, card replacement and record updates.
When given clearance to recruit staff for such offices, he said, NIA would absorb 3,200 out of the 70,000 contract staff engaged for the registration exercises who did not have disciplinary issues.
He said NIA, would in the coming months, set up premium registration centres in selected regions, set up review committees to address challenged cases and register children below 15 years as well as Ghanaians living abroad.
On the use of the NIA database by other state agencies , Prof. Attafuah said, the Authority had signed a Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority(DVLA), Bank of Ghana, Social Security and National Insurance Trust, Ghana Revenue Authority , Electoral Commission and others.
The MoU would “result in these agencies no longer producing sector specific ID cards and saving hundreds of millions of cedis over the 15 years life cycle of the NIS project”, he said.
BY JONATHAN DONKOR
