Birth Notification Service For Civil Registration In Kenya – SOA Model

Abstract

The problem of birth notification and registration has limited the rights of children to education, health, recognition among other human rights. The challenge to sufficient registration of new born babies is traceable to the initial stage of notification. The aim of this project was to investigate application of modern ICT technologies in solving birth notification problems in rural communities and the use of web services in sharing birth information with various stakeholders. The specific objectives that project sought to address include; investigation of current birth notification system in Kenya, the processes, finding the appropriateness of application of service oriented architecture in designing and developing a prototype for birth notification solution. The intention was to allow real time pre-notification of vital events by parents, verification of that information by local agents, and sharing of that data for use by other government agents. The events that take place in hospitals were also included in a broad solution. In this project two approaches were used where case study of a remote Sub County of injara in Garissa County was used to study rural events and processes. Then IT product design and development was used to develop prototype based on service oriented methodology .This is an iterative and incremental process of transforming business processes to services until services are developed, deployed and can execute as expected. The prototype in which parents and guardians would notify birth events as soon as they happen, using SMS, web portal or mobile application was developed. The registered birth data consumers could import data to their applications from the prototype using an API in desired platform. The testing and evaluation findings revealed that application of integrated services of SMS, Web application and Mobile application have positive implications in birth notification process. This was so through real time reporting of events. The evaluation of the system showed that the integrated services can improve birth notification experience both for rural events and hospital events as well as provide real time data for other consumers such as national health care insurers as well as statistical data consumers.