The Civil Registry Office (CRO) is a key link in the chain of public service delivery in Uzbekistan. Among numerous functions, it issues certificates of birth, marriage and death, basic documents that are necessary in order to receive a whole gamut of other public services. Previously, handwritten requests took 2-3 days for each certificate, as well as to ensure timely and proper registration of birth, death, marriage and divorce, users had to bear transportation costs and wait in queues.

The economic and social development of countries, as well as their global competitiveness, is increasingly determined by their degree of digitalization. In recent years, reforms carried out in Uzbekistan have been accompanied by intensive integration of communication technologies into bureaucratic processes. The population's access to electronic services is expanding and public services are gradually being transformed to digital form.

As a result of new digitalization initiatives, CRO will replace the manual search of its archives - containing over 60 million records dating from the nineteenth century to 2018 - by electronic searching tools. This will help to drastically cut the time and effort to look up information in the archives and speed up the processes of service delivery. This means that people will no longer need to collect various certificates while applying for relevant public services.

As part of ongoing reforms, a new institution with regional units – Public Services Agency (PSA) – was created under the Ministry of Justice to bypass bureaucratic pathways and processes now regarded as ossified.

To date, twelve sets of modern scanners for digitization of archives – as part of the EU/UNDP project “Improved Public Service Delivery and Enhanced Governance in Rural Uzbekistan” – have been delivered and installed in regional offices of the PSA. Blockchain-based solutions for civil registry records have also been introduced in tandem to ensure integrity and safety of the archived data. The goal is to convert all paper-based archives to electronic records in a single database enabling automated search and processing of data.

The digitalization of the CRO archives, to be completed in 2022, will change the way citizens access key public services. It will especially benefit the 15 million people who live in rural areas of Uzbekistan, particularly the vulnerable groups (rural women, youth, elderly and persons with disabilities). All the services provided by the civil registry offices throughout the country will now be done online, fast, and free of bureaucracy and queues. The new digital system will dramatically increase the quality and efficiency of public service delivery in Uzbekistan.

The changes involved at the CRO are multifaceted. The digitization of archives in all 14 Civil Registry Offices country-wide, which involves the introduction of technological innovations, such as blockchain technology, is needed to secure sensitive data. By helping to push the CRO into the digital era, this EU/UNDP project is contributing to the nationwide efforts of the Uzbek government to improve access to public services as part of a wider public administration reform.