Civil Registration and Vital Statistics 2013: challenges, best practice and design principles for modern systems

Overview

Within the domain of public health, information obtained from civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) is critical, allowing tracking of individual births and building profiles of mortality and causes of death. These data play a fundamental role in planning and monitoring public health outcomes, as well as a broad range of outcomes in other policy domains.

Five design principles are proposed in this report to support improvement of CRVS IS: (a) establish CRVS as a public good; (b) establish institutional incentives to keep the CRVS updated and of good quality; (c) establish a holistic approach to CRVS design; (d) establish the business relationships of identified information flows; and (e) develop the technical approach for operationalization of these relationships.