From left: Tsepa Ramoriting (OpenText), Khudu Matlala (Department of Home Affairs) and Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo (Faranani DocTec) at OpenText Summit Africa 2026.
Large digitisation programmes rarely fail on technology. They fail on planning, governance and the way people and processes are organised around the tools. That is the central lesson from the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) Digitisation of Civic Records Project, one of the largest civic records programmes of its kind in the world.
Faranani shared that experience on two stages in 2026. At OpenText Summit Africa 2026, Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo, Phetogo programme manager at Faranani, joined Tsepa Ramoriting, vice-president of sales for OpenText Africa, and Khudu Matlala, director: document management at the DHA, for a session on managing complexity in large-scale digitisation. In September 2026, Isaacs-Mpulo presented “From Paper to Data” at the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) GovTech 2026 conference.
The programme must digitise 340 million civic records – births, marriages, amendments and deaths – dating back to the early 1800s. As at 16 September 2026, 80.9 million records (24%) had been digitised, with 310 million images captured and 3.2 petabytes of data under management. The lessons below apply to any organisation digitising at scale, public or private.
The volume is striking, but it is not what makes the programme difficult. For context, Morocco’s civil-registry tender covers more than 38 million records across 1 821 offices. Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has enrolled more than 142 million people, but into a new biometric database rather than by converting paper archives.
The closest international peer is the UK’s Civil Registration Service Transformation Programme, at more than 130 million registration copies. That is about 40% of the DHA programme’s volume.
What makes the DHA programme hard is the combination of conditions around the volume:
- One department, one standard. All 340 million records sit under a single agency, not a federation of registries.
- A live service. Records are queried and retrieved every day while conversion continues around them.
- Legal weight. Records stand as evidence of identity and status, so accuracy and chain of custody cannot be compromised.
- Privacy at national scale. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) brings classification, retention and audit obligations to every record.
- Almost 226 years of variety. Records span several languages, scripts, handwriting styles and media conditions.
As Isaacs-Mpulo told GovTech delegates, the real complexity is human, procedural, regulatory, environmental, organisational and informational. Technology is rarely where projects fail.
The first transferable lesson is to settle what, why, where, who and how before buying a single tool. At OpenText Summit Africa, the speakers were clear that the answers, not a vendor, should decide the technology. Here is how the DHA programme answered each one.
- What is being digitised, and how will it be found? Civic records on paper, bound books and microfilm. The media dictated the technology, and a file plan decided how records would be retrieved.
- Why digitise? Service delivery first, preservation always. The team started with recent records that affect living citizens; family history and genealogy follow.
- Where does the work happen? In six hubs across Gauteng and North West, each with one purpose – from bulk scanning and indexing to bound volumes and microfilm. Records come from all nine provinces.
- Who is involved? The DHA Civics Branch is the client. Phetogo provides hardware, enterprise content management (ECM), training, human resources and programme management. Young graduates run the workflow end to end.
- How is it delivered? A hybrid model. The DHA supplies buildings, information technology infrastructure, consumables and the records; Phetogo runs the operation.
Each answer narrows the next decision. Choosing scanners before knowing the media, or software before knowing who consumes the output, locks in problems that no later investment can fix.
The second lesson is to manage the programme as a system, not as a technology project. Six work streams and many departmental dependencies must move in sequence. If one work group runs ahead of the others, delivery stalls. The DHA programme places all work streams under a single steering committee, with monthly reporting to the DHA executive committee and the political sponsor.
Measurement makes that possible. Annual targets cascade into quarterly, monthly and daily dashboards, so the team knows yesterday’s output by 11am. A day lost to a power cut is visible at once and recovered the next day. The executive brief from OpenText Summit Africa summed up the approach as “go slow to go fast”: careful, whole-system planning upfront makes delivery predictable later.
Governance is the third discipline, because these records can be called to court. Every process is captured in documented standard operating procedures (SOPs), and every action leaves an audit trail that cannot be erased. Each record then follows one controlled path:
- Intake and verification. Every batch is receipted and checked against the register before work starts, and each record is tracked at every station.
- Prepare and scan. Image quality is checked at several points before a batch moves on.
- Capture and index. Records are checked against the National Population Register (NPR) and auto-indexed where possible. Each record is indexed twice by separate indexers, and the two must match 100% before publication.
- Publish and return. The record is retrievable in the repository, and the original is re-shelved and traceable.
As Isaacs-Mpulo put it at GovTech: “A record you cannot retrieve has not been digitised – it has been photographed.”
Digitisation is the foundation of digital transformation, not the destination. Isaacs-Mpulo drew a sharp line between three terms that are often used as one:
Digitisation converts a physical record into a governed digital asset. This is where the DHA programme sits.
Digitalisation redesigns the process around that data, for example, straight-through processing with no manual file step at the counter.
Digital transformation changes what government can offer the citizen: ask once, and services no longer depend on retrieving a file.
Each stage is only possible once the one before it can be trusted. A scanned image lets you find the photograph, but not search inside it. Only when a record is indexed, structured and governed can other systems rely on it.
Four disciplines make that shift. Validate the data, not just the image, and sample and report accuracy. Treat the repository as a live production system in the service path, not an archive. Capture once and verify once, so one authoritative copy ends duplicate re-keying. And build records management, privacy, security and audit in from the start rather than retrofitting them.
The same logic applies to artificial intelligence (AI). POPIA governs every record: lawful purpose, minimisation, retention and audit. Where AI comes near identity or personal information, the programme requires human review, no unverified inference and full traceability. Automation applied to untrusted data does not save effort; it scales the error and hides it.
Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo speaks on managing complexity in large-scale digitisation projects at OpenText Summit Africa 2026. (Image: AI-enhanced)
The benefits do not wait for the 340 millionth record. All 80.9 million records digitised so far can already be retrieved electronically, which changes service at the counter today.
For citizens, time is the difference. Speaking at OpenText Summit Africa, Matlala said the department was once heavily manual and often could not finalise cases within the promised turnaround time. Records are now retrieved immediately, so queues are shorter and cases close on time. A grandmother who once spent her grant money travelling back and forth can now visit once and find her application finalised.
For fraud prevention, one person has one identity. When someone applies to change details such as a surname, officials can pull up the birth record at once to confirm who they are. Each birth record is indexed with 20 fields, including both parents’ names and the hospital and city of birth. Even when 100 people share a name, those fields identify the right person, and cross-referencing makes fake identities far harder to sustain.
For accountability, every action is visible. Access is controlled by security level, not by who holds the file. Because every action is logged and attributable, documents cannot be quietly sold.
For young South Africans, the work is the training. More than 3 500 young people have been employed through the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative over the term of the project, with 1 700 on site today. About 3 000 have been trained across 19 courses and 136 programmes, with functional training accredited by a Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA). They leave with transferable skills in scanning, indexing, quality control and records handling.
The DHA programme is a public-sector project, but its lessons apply to any organisation with large volumes of paper and a need to act on the information inside it. Banks, insurers, healthcare providers and municipalities face the same choices at a smaller scale.
- Plan before you buy. Answer what, why, where, who and how first. The technology follows the answers.
- Manage the whole, not the parts. Plan across every work stream and level, and track output daily so problems surface within hours.
- Govern as if the record will be tested in court. Documented procedures, chain of custody and full audit trails are what make volume trustworthy.
- Do not skip a step. Trusted, indexed data has to come before connected services and automation.
- Count the wider returns. Faster service, less fraud and new skills are part of the business case, not side benefits.
According to Matlala, the focus now is making sure service delivery is fully realised and moving into wider digital transformation, which the department says it is ready for because of what this project has put in place. That is the real measure of a digitisation programme: not how many pages it scans, but what the organisation can do once the record becomes data.
Sources
OpenText Summit Africa 2026, “At scale, governance and planning beat technology”, top five takeaways, session with Tsepa Ramoriting (OpenText) and Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo (Faranani).
OpenText Summit Africa 2026, “Manage the programme as a system, not a technology project”, executive brief, Department of Home Affairs case study.
OpenText Summit Africa 2026, “One visit, one record: faster service, fewer fakes”, Department of Home Affairs Q&A with Khudu Matlala.
Noedine Isaacs-Mpulo, “From Paper to Data: digitising government information for efficiency and automation”, SITA GovTech 2026, September 2026. Progress figures as at 16 September 2026.
Department of Communications and Digital Technologies, statement on the 2026 Government Technology Conference, gov.za.
Morocco World News, Morocco launches $19.4 million digital transformation of civil registry, April 2025.
BusinessDay, NIMC enrolments hit 142m as Nigeria expands digital identity infrastructure, September 2026.
UK Home Office, Civil Registration Service Transformation Programme appointment letter, GOV.UK, June 2024.