Marital status: Millions of deeds to be computerized

The Ministry of the Interior is about to launch a major project aimed at modernizing the civil status system. The project involves, in particular, digitizing all paper registers held by civil status offices in municipalities, Moroccan consulates, and diplomatic centers.This project, as provided for in Article 54 of Law No. 36-21, aims to establish a fully digitized, comprehensive, and reliable national database. This database will then be made available to the various administrations, public institutions, and relevant departments.

Three steps

The Ministry of the Interior had implemented a national strategy aimed at qualifying and upgrading the national civil status institution using an integrated approach involving the private sector through the various stages of updating civil status, particularly in terms of digitizing paper registers. The final step was to digitize and transfer all data to electronic media to regularly feed the national digital register.
The current project is structured around three stages. The first consists of identifying and storing all paper registers and documents relating to births, deaths, marriages, and divorces. This will provide an overview as well as a qualitative and quantitative description of the documents and registers so that they can be entered and stored on electronic media.

Awareness meetings

To ensure the success of this national project, the Ministry of the Interior has just sent a note to the local authorities concerned through the «walis» (head governors) of 10 regions, inviting them to carry out this census. The regions of Rabat-Salé-Kenitra and Casablanca-Settat are not concerned by this phase since the project has already been completed there and has enabled the capture of nearly 20 million electronic documents. In addition, the provincial civil status services are called upon to organize awareness-raising meetings for the benefit of municipal presidents, as well as training conferences for department heads and their officials.
After completing a short training course, local government officials are currently training on the dedicated website before starting to populate it with the required information.
Hassan EL ARIF