Beginning May 2017, pupils and students aged five to 16 will be registered by the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA).
The registered pupils and students will for the first time be part of the complete National Identification Register (NIR). According to Gilbert Kadilo, the public relations and corporate affairs manager at NIRA, the nationwide exercise will be carried out in three months.
He said pupils and students are being registered now because they were not captured during the previous registration for national identity cards. Their exclusion, he said, meant the NIR was incomplete.
In an interview with The Observer at NIRA’s head offices in Kololo last week, Kadilo said a complete NIR will have a comprehensive database of citizens that can be used in planning. The NIR will also support effective planning for school-going children.
“We have a major programme coming up in partnership with the ministry of education to register all pupils and students in the country. Students and pupils will go with enrollment forms as they break off for the first term holidays so that their parents and guardians can help fill them. The parents and guardians will then attach photocopies of their IDs before returning the forms to schools during the second term. We shall be rolling that plan out in May 2017,” Kadilo said.
The registered children aged five to 16 will be allocated National Identification Numbers (NINs) but not national identification cards (IDs). Their NINs will be captured and the NIRA use them to issue IDs.
NIRA estimates that about 10 million pupils and students will be registered during the three months’ exercise.
“For parents who don’t have national IDs, this is the time to register and those who have never picked them should go and get them from their districts. Short of that, the child will not be registered if his or her parents/guardian didn’t register for the national IDs and that has repercussions,” he said.
“Having this enrolment done means that at any one time, the ministry of education could tap into the register and know the actual number of pupils in a school. It will for the first time help deal with ghost students and pupils.”
Kadilo added that NIRA would soon open offices in every district to handle civil registration matters such as birth, death and adoption. The authority is also looking to scale up registration of children aged zero to five years so as to have a complete register of all citizens.
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