Universal Civil Identity Project of the Americas (PUICA)

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Lines of Action

From 2010 to the present, PUICA has implemented projects in a total of 19[1] Member States of Central and South America and the Caribbean in five strategic areas: Hospital birth registration; Mobile campaigns; Reconstruction of destroyed records; Interoperability and process modernization and; Horizontal cooperation and identification of successful practices.

Each of these strategic areas responds to one or more of the specific measures enumerated in Resolution 2362 Inter-American Program for Universal Civil Registry and the “Right to Identity.”

1. Hospital Birth Registration Hospital birth registration serves two important objectives: it reduces under-registration at the moment it occurs and it serves as an important space for expecting parents as well as health workers and other community leaders to learn about the importance of civil identity. In conjunction with civil registry authorities and public hospitals, the projects provide adequate facilities and information technology, and support training and public awareness campaigns.

2. Mobile Registration Campaigns Lack of access to civil registry offices is considered as an important cause of under-registration.  Mobile units campaigns seek to address this issue by traveling to remote areas to issue documents or correct erroneous information in situ. Mobile campaign projects also strengthen alliances with public, nongovernmental and religious organizations, raise public awareness and provide training and appropriate technological infrastructure, thus putting in place a permanent mechanism to guarantee civil identity for these communities. Recent PUICA efforts have focused on border areas, where populations are disproportionately more likely to lack civil identity documents.

3. Reconstruction of destroyed records PUICA provides technical assistance for the restoration of identity records that have been destroyed by natural disasters or internal conflicts. This effort combines elements of public awareness, archival research, physical reconstruction of vital events records, use of technology to repair and preserve damaged documents and issuance and delivery of copies of reconstructed documents to the beneficiaries.

4. Institutional Interoperability and Process Modernization Until recently, most civil registry procedures were paper-based. Information was entered into large registration books, often stored in the municipalities whose responsibility it was to record birth, deaths and marriages. Most countries in the Americas have now embarked on a process of automatizing registries in centralized databases, using scanned versions of the original records to verify the veracity and accuracy of the information. 

5. Horizontal cooperation and identification of successful practices One of the primary purposes of PUICA is to foster regional and horizontal cooperation in the many facets of civil identity. The principal mechanism for this exchange of information is the Latin American and Caribbean Council for Civil Registration, Identity and Vital Statistics (CLARCIEV by its Spanish acronym) PUICA has also developed strategic alliances with the United Nations Vital Statistics Division, UNICEF, the Inter-American Development Bank and Plan International, and has conducted analysis and workshops with national civil registry authorities in the Americas. PUICA is a member of the Global Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Group and is one of eighteen organizations that endorsed the “Principles on identification for sustainable development: toward the digital age”.