Question NW2318 to the Minister of Home Affairs
03 July 2023 - NW2318
van der Merwe, Ms LL to ask the Minister of Home Affairs
(1)Whether, with reference to his department’s announcement last year of the recruitment of 10 000 unemployed young graduates for the digitisation of its civic paper records, which was set to happen in three phases (details furnished), all 10 000 unemployed graduates have been recruited into his department; if not, why not; if so, what total number of the more than 350 million civic paper records have been digitised to date;
Reply:
- The employment of the 10 000 unemployed young graduates is in Three Phases. In the first phase we earmark to recruit 2000 unemployed youth, however 1045 were recruited and we are planning to fill the outstanding during the second phase.
The advert for the 2nd 4000 cohort closed on the 03 March 2023 and there were 45028 applications received. The third phase will conclude the recruitment of the last cohort which will be an additional 4000.
Preparations of records for digitisation in provinces has begun with detailed indexing and condition assessing of records. The records digitisation only commenced in Gauteng at back office (BVR) during June 2023 where the initial system set up and testing is in progress and over 35 000 records were digitised by 23 June 2023. To date, the Department has received 12 of the 20 high volume scanners that were procured. Each scanner is capable of scanning 300 pages per minute and can be operated by 6 persons. It is estimated that each scanner will be able to scan at least 108 thousand pages a day.
- Based on the current planning information it is expected that the digitisation of records will be completed by Jan 2026, in line with project deadlines. The last equipment was delivered on 18 June 2023 and the process to complete the digitisation hubs is on track with the physical building being prepared in line with the end to end process of the project.
END