Mykolaiv, 20 March 2025 – The Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine, has started the digitisation of nearly 3 million civil status records from Mykolaiv Oblast. This will help preserve critically important data about citizens and ensure state registries contain verified information.

The documents contain information about the births, deaths, marriage and divorces of citizens of the region, as well as records of any changes in their names (surname, first name, or patronymic). In the month since the project began in February, almost 650,000 civil records have been scanned, and it is planned that a total of 2,750,000 documents are to be digitised.

On 20 March, representatives of the Ministry of Justice and UNDP in Ukraine visited Mykolaiv to monitor the progress made in digitally scanning the documents.

The records come from the National Archival Fund of Ukraine. Scanning them helps preserve important data in wartime, when there is the threat of the loss or destruction of paper documents. This is especially important for the city of Mykolaiv, which has been under near constant attack for the three years of full-scale war.

In addition, digitising documents helps speed up the provision of public services to citizens, as the data is added to the relevant state registers. This facilitates the verification of information about recipients of public services, which in turn helps to increase the efficiency of their provision.

The project to scan civil status records was initiated by the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine with support from UNDP in Ukraine and funding from the Government of Denmark. Technical support was provided by the DIA Support project, which is implemented by UNDP in Ukraine with funding from Sweden.

Earlier in 2024, UNDP in Ukraine supported the scanning of civil status records evacuated from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. At that time, 3,156,710 documents about citizens of these regions were digitised in Dnipro in less than half a year.

Media inquiries:

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