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HomE affairs casE study

Home Affairs goes Digital

Once typifying the worst in service delivery, the Department of Home Affairs is now pioneering a raft of
e-government services, writes dudley moloi.

Rosslyn is better known for its hi-
tech motor assembly lines than for
government services. What is little
known is that the suburb to the west
of the City of Tshwane also houses the
largest lot of the nation’s civic records,
ranging from birth and marriage to death
certificates. The Rosslyn storage site
and similar facilities across the country
together house 281 million “cradle to
grave” records, some 90% of which
are in paper format. The paper-based
civic records are kept in perpetuity as
each passing generation adds millions
of its own records on top of the already
growing pile.

Keeping up with the times

Beyond being artefacts or data, the
records tell stories of how a multitude
of past laws, from the Land Act to the
Pass Law, determined identity, where from paper to bytes process could be completed in a matter
one lived, where one could secure work of minutes, or a few days at most.
and the kind of services (if any) that Launched at the end of 2016, the
could be expected from government. digitisation of civic records (DCR) project digital identity
In the age of the Internet of Things, the has been carried out in partnership
mounds of paper signify an inefficient with Statistics South Africa (Stats SA). infrastructure
and expensive anachronism. The DCR project is reliant on both the
technology and the expertise of Stats SA As much as the objective of the DCR
As some records date back as far as the to convert the millions of paper records project is essentially retrospective in
late 1800s, the way in which important at Rosslyn and elsewhere into digital nature, it foreshadows a future in which
civic documents were captured, stored formats. Working from the year 2000 most of the transactions associated with
and retrieved had essentially not backwards, the project has a target of the work of the DHA would be entirely
changed in hundreds of years. processing an estimated 110 million electronic. In fact, the majority of civic
paper birth certificates at an annual rate records after the year 2000 are already
Under the Department of Home Affairs’ of conversion of 5,8 million records. in a digital format, largely due to the
(DHA) broad modernisation programme, investment in the Home Affairs National
a number of transforming initiatives are Not only is the DCR project expected Identification System (HANIS) as far
underway. Project by project, these to yield savings in space, it also has back as the mid-1990s.
are aimed at yanking the mandate of an obvious spin-off of increasing the
the department from the 19 to the 21 st efficiency of Home Affairs offices. HANIS, which provides the infrastructure
th
Century. Accessing back records through a click for the nation’s identification, has gone
of a mouse means that those transactions through a number of modifications
that used to take weeks and months to since it was officially launched in 2000.
Volume 11 No. 3 of 2018 | SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW 23