The Cook Islands’ roll-out of an open-source system to record births, marriages and deaths is seen as a reference case for the Pacific, where many are still born and die without ever being registered.
On 3 March, the Cook Islands Government will go live with Te Reinga Ora'anga, a digital system for registering births, deaths, marriages and other life events. To be launched at the Ministry of Justice in Avarua, the platform will manage civil registration records efficiently and securely, built using open-source technology in a world-first implementation.
Civil registration is a core government function, referring to the recording of births, adoptions, marriages, name changes, divorces and deaths, and their flow-on use for issuing identity documents like passports and in official statistics such as population estimates. While often invisible to the public, it underpins the right to vote and access services such as schooling, healthcare and banking.
Te Reinga Ora'anga supports the registration of life’s milestones electronically which officials say will reduce waste and improve data accuracy.
“The Cook Islands are taking a system that already works and making it fit for the way people live now,” said Mr Jeff Montgomery, a civil registration specialist with the Pacific Community (SPC), who supported the Cook Islands with the roll-out.
“The Cook Islands have strong civil registration coverage by regional standards, and Te Reinga Ora'anga is not a response to widespread non-registration. Instead, it modernises manual processes that can be slow, vulnerable to error, and difficult to share with authorised agencies when required.”
The Cook Islands’ circumstances make the change particularly relevant. Although the Cook Islands have a resident population of around 17,300, a much larger population of descendants live overseas, particularly in New Zealand. Records are often required across borders, sometimes many years later.
“We already register these events, but paper-based systems have limitations,” said Mr Peter Graham, Cook Islands Secretary of Justice. “This platform gives us a more resilient and future-ready way to manage records that people depend on, both here and overseas.”
The work to implement Te Reinga Ora'anga has been supported technically by SPC and funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Data for Health Initiative, which backs efforts to improve civil registration and population data.
An open-source world first
The platform underpinning Te Reinga Ora'anga is OpenCRVS, an open-source civil registration system developed as a digital public good. Its source code is publicly available, allowing governments to adapt the system to local contexts and avoid becoming locked into commercial, proprietary software.
SPC works with OpenCRVS as a technical partner across the Pacific, supporting governments to configure and implement the system in ways that reflect regional realities, including small populations, limited expertise and geographic dispersion.
“Open-source allows governments and their peoples to retain control of their information systems and adapt them over time,” said Mr Shez Farooq, Pacific Transformation Lead with OpenCRVS. “It also allows countries to learn from each other’s implementations, rather than starting from scratch.”
The Cook Islands is the first country to adopt an open-source solution across the full range of civil registration events—from births and adoptions to marriages, name changes and deaths—following Niue’s implementation for births and deaths in 2023.
Getting everyone in the picture
Across the Pacific, civil registration remains one of the region’s least visible administrative challenges. Agencies estimate that around half of all births and most deaths go unregistered, with the biggest gaps often found in remote and outer-island communities.
“In much of the rest of the Pacific, people can be born, live and die without ever appearing in official records,” Mr Montgomery said. “This is not an abstract failure. Without proof of their birth, children can miss out on going to school. Without a death certificate, families can struggle to settle affairs.”
For governments and development agencies, the implications are equally significant. “Missing records mean planning health, education and social services without knowing who—or how many—they are meant to serve.”
With SPC’s work to support civil registration in the region, the Cook Islands roll-out serves as something of a reference case, providing a functioning example of how civil registration systems can be modernised in a Pacific context. As well as the Cook Islands, SPC is working actively to fully implement OpenCRVS in Niue, Tuvalu and Kiribati in 2026.
“Civil registration rarely attracts attention when it works well. But when systems are reliable and fit for purpose, they support everything else that governments and communities are trying to do.”
For more information on this story, contact Mr Ben Campion, Communications Adviser, Statistics for Development Division, Pacific Community (SPC).
Top photo by BananaStock on Freeimages.com.
