Kyiv, 27 June 2024 – In Dnipro, 3,156,710 civil status records earlier evacuated from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts have been scanned in an initiative to preserve critical data for the provision of public services, speed up service delivery, and ensure state registers contain verified information.

The digitisation project, launched by the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine, is part of the DIA Support project funded by Sweden. 

The civil status records include information on births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and name change (surname, first name, patronymic). The records are essential for providing several public services to citizens. 

After scanning, the documents were uploaded to the State Register of Civil Status Acts of Citizens, and verification of the scanned copies was carried out. The scanning was conducted at the Southern Interregional Department of the Ministry of Justice in Dnipro.

The scanning of the records will ensure the preservation of data about citizens and their future verification in the registry, said Serhii Orlov, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine for Digital Development, Digital Transformations and Digitalisation.

“Verification is crucial to correct any errors in the register,” Orlov said. “Thanks to the high quality of the data, the state will be able to create even more automatic services. Thanks to the digitization of these legal records, we can speed up the verification of data and improve the identification of citizens. As a result, this will allow automatic services to be created, including, for example, in the social sphere. The global project that we’re doing together with our partners will allow us to speed up the development of automatic services in the state ecosystem of Ukraine. We plan to expand the scale of the initiative to the whole of Ukraine in order to ensure the widest possible availability of the information in the register, and to protect important documents from the threats caused by the full-scale war.”

Starting from February 2024, more than 3 million documents transported to Dnipro from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were scanned over a period of four months – a shorter time than had been expected. However, the work was complicated by the quality of some of the documents, some of this date back to the 1940s.

The initiative to digitize paper civil status records is to be extended across the entire country in order to ensure the state’s archives and data about its citizens are preserved.

The UNDP is committed to supporting the Ukrainian government in strengthening its IT infrastructure and developing state registers, which are key to the state's ability to perform its functions, UNDP Resident Representativein Ukraine Jaco Cilliers said, commenting on the initiative.

“The smooth operation of state registers is a key prerequisite for citizens to receive the services they need from the state, despite the unprecedented challenges caused by the war,” Cilliers said. “The civil status record scanning project is one of the components of our joint work with the Ministry of Justice, supported by our partners. The scaling-up of this initiative will ensure the preservation of documents that are important for the provision of state services, and also ensure state registers have accurate data.”

This is not the first partnership initiative to support the development of the Ministry of Justice’s electronic registers: Previously, the UNDP supported the development of the Justice Ministry's IT infrastructure and electronic registers, using funding from the government of Sweden. The computer equipment and technical support the UNDP provided helped the ministry digitalise a range of important types of documents.

Media inquiries

Yuliia Samus, UNDP Ukraine Communications Team Leader, yuliia.samus@undp.org