Vital Stats Closed for Relocation; Faster, Easier Process Expected by Next May

For years, anyone who has needed the services rendered at the Vital Statistics Office has discovered how painstaking, time-consuming and sometimes inconvenient that process can be. Getting copies of important documents like birth, marriage, and death certificates can easily take double the time you expected, most of the time because of lost records, insufficient information provided to process an application, or even spelling errors. But the department has been undergoing upgrades and one of them is its relocation. Today its Queen Street office was fully shuttered as staff members are engaged in relocating. That relocation is to the Charles Bartlett Hyde Building, formerly the Complex Building on Mahogany Street, where renovations are being wrapped up this week. So for this week, the Vital Stats office in Belize City will be closed for that relocation process. To address the tedious and inconvenient process it takes to apply for and to receive documents, there has also been a full digitization and digitalization of the system. As Minister of E-Governance, Michel Chebat explains, the public should be able to access birth, marriage or death certificates from anywhere within the country very soon.

Michel Chebat

Michel Chebat, Minister of E-Governance

“We have also engaged consultants who have been working on the transformation of our documents and digitized documents, and we are expecting – and I’m going to keep my fingers crossed – that by May of next year, we’re going to see this project launched to all of our citizens. What that means is that wherever you are throughout the country, you’ll be able to access these documents.”