By Patricia Kapulula

Lilongwe, June 4, Mana: The National Registration Bureau (NRB) is implementing a number of innovations in order to improve service delivery.

Principal Secretary for NRB, Mphatso Sambo, said one of the innovations is the Document Tracker Software which allows Malawians to follow and track the status of their national identity (ID) cards.

Sambo was speaking in Lilongwe on Tuesday during a press briefing to update Malawians on the National Registration and Identification System (NRIS).

He said the development is important as it goes a long way in keeping up with the digital era in as far as national registration is concerned.

“We are also implementing Digital Identity Solution, Biometric Verification System and functional review to establish offices at each and every Traditional Authority (TA) across the country, among others,” he said.

In the 2023-2024 national ID outreach registration, NRB covered all the 28 districts in eight phases with each phase lasting 15 days. A total of 1,556,613 new registrants were registered surpassing the target of 1,500,000 people.

According to Sambo, the statistics do not indicate those for replacements as the figures were already in the system by the time of the exercise.

“As NRB, despite beating the target of new registrants, there are still pockets of Malawians who have turned the age of 16 but are yet to register with us,” he said.

The Bureau expects to run a mop up registration exercise from June 10 to August, 2024 in order to register all those that were left out during the outreach registration and register all resident foreigners with valid documents from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services.