LocationsOwning a civil register: how Naoero is building its own
October 15, 2026
Naoero's BDM team discusses the TIDE implementation plan, putting national priorities and local decision-making at the centre of the country's digital civil registration transformation.
Naoero is one of the smallest States in the world.
Small should not mean less sovereign
When it comes to Digital Transformation of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics work, the offer small States usually receive is a system designed elsewhere, delivered “ready to run” with minimum work from the team, on the reasoning that a country our size cannot build such a thing itself.
We took a different view
We — the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages, with UNDP as technical partner — set the design principles ourselves, for our own citizens. The entire approach is named TIDE (Transforming and Integrating Digital Enrolment) – built following our own law and to meet our own unique needs and how we function as a society.
The system build was contracted; the governance was not
The software is the easiest part
A civil register is the record through which we recognise our people. Legal identity, entitlement, the family record and the electoral roll all rest on it. Coverage is already high: an estimated 95% of the population have their birth registered, around 90% of births are registered within a year of birth, and around 95% of deaths within a year, with a medical certificate of cause of death for every death. Births, deaths and marriages are the three events the register records, and each carries its own legal weight for the citizen.
We have found that writing the software for this is the smallest task. The harder work is the governance, the data, the capacity of our own officers, and the trust of the people whose lives the register holds.
As such, we treated the software as the last step, making sure the enabling environment is shored up before anything else.
Taking the time to get it right
Trust is earned step by step.
We have moved the launch date more than once, resisting pressure to rush or import “best practice”. A civil register must be complete and accurate before citizens depend on it for important services. This work has, is and will be transforming us into a modern fit for purpose team – so it has been key that we are clear on challenges and take the time to manage the risks for our citizens.
Ownership means what we can actually do
We have found that ownership is holding the decisions and directing the work, thoughtfully.
We can (and have) changed our suppliers. We negotiated our own costs. We have dedicated in-country support for our system (rather than a shared pool of experts who may be pulled to other priorities).
The key decisions stay with us
Certain decisions stay with the Office whoever holds the contract, and each answers a real pressure on a small register.
Some of these are:
• How we record a citizen born overseas, so that dei-Naoero abroad remain part of the register.
• How we bring in new citizens, and people whose records are incomplete, without distorting what the register already holds.
• How we leave the door open for later uses, elections and social benefits among them, so the register can serve them when the time is right, without building that complexity in now.
• Which record is authoritative, who may reach it, and who answers in law for a registration act, which cannot be delegated to a contractor or a system.
We accepted technical help from UNDP. The support was solution-neutral: advice on how to decide, which left the decisions with us.
Colleagues from Naoero’s Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM), whose work is helping strengthen the country’s civil registration system through the nationally led TIDE digital transformation initiative, with technical support from UNDP.
A BDM officer works through civil registration records, supporting the careful review and verification of data needed to build a reliable digital register for Naoero.
The Path to launch
The work runs in three streams, namely:
• Data - we are cleaning and linking the register before it moves into the new system. Of a register of roughly 17,300 records, our officers have reviewed and linked over half to date. Matching each child to the correct parent is done by hand, record by record; an automated matching trial was set aside because every link must be verified before it can be relied upon. Our officers work to weekly clean-up targets alongside their daily duties, and the hard parent-to-child links continue as their own stream after launch. Duplicates, variant spellings of names and tribes, and incomplete entries are corrected before migration, so that what goes live is a clean record.
• System - TIDE was specified to meet our requirements first and foremost, our law, and was tested against real registration cases by our own officers. It runs on Government infrastructure in Naoero, and its source code is held in a Government-owned repository. The system is being rebuilt on standard, widely-used tooling in place of the original bespoke code, so that in future it can be maintained by any competent IT team and not only those familiar with its particular design. The remaining items from testing are being completed before go-live.
• Governance and process - we took the core decisions before the system was built. First versions of the operating procedures are being drafted, user roles set, and the question of which record is legally authoritative after launch settled. These are our decisions to make. Best practices are useful but should not be applied in a skin-deep way. Getting genuine buy-in and shared objectives take time.
Regional leadership and data sovereignty
At the 2026 meeting of the Asia-Pacific Regional Steering Group for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Naoero set out key points, and the meeting's report carries them in full. These were - governance frameworks come before interoperability, the law shapes the system, , civil registration is a public good and a right of citizens, not a product.
They also recorded our core ethos that a delivered system is not the same as an owned one; owning the software is not the same as holding the decisions it carries out.
We also noted that interoperability is an instrument for a defined national purpose. It is not a default to be adopted because it is available. Data sovereignty comes before technical connection. In the language of the field, the civil register is foundational digital public infrastructure: the layer other public services build upon. For that reason the order matters — the foundation is made sound and sovereign first, before it carries anything else.
The meeting's own conclusions moved to the same ground: establish legal frameworks before new technology, and treat data sovereignty as a matter of resilience.
What we want to share, and who else is on this path
At the regional event, we been heartened to see other Small Island States build their own, among them Maldives and Vanuatu in Asia-Pacific region
The questions that matter most to us are practical ones:
• if/ how far to make a system interoperable, and when
• how to leave the door open for a national identity number without over-complicating the register first
• how to apply international standards where they are relevant to the people of Naoero, and set them aside where they are not
• how discipline and governance, more than any feature, are what make a register resilient.
Small should not mean less sovereign
TIDE launch is later this year. We intend to share our experience with counterparts at the Pacific Civil Registrars Network in the lead-up to the launch, so other small states weighing the same choices can see how one of them approached it.
Our size may limit our budget but it does not limit our capacity to govern . We accepted help, on our own terms and at our own pace – as we believe the foundations need to have depth and specificity for any of this to work, sustainably and resiliently, for our citizens.