Civil registration provides legal identity to individuals, enabling them to prove family ties, their place and date of birth, and fulfill their rights and obligations. It can facilitate access to essential services such as education and health and contribute to exercising political rights, transferring property, and accessing financial services. However, the gender-related aspects of civil registration systems remain under-researched and a reliable and permanent flow of data generated from civil registration is needed to support better evidence-based national administrative systems and planning.
This projects aims to strengthen civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems to become gender sensitive and to produce consistently high-quality vital statistics for development decision-making. The project, implemented in collaboration with the UN Population Fund, will pilot and advance a new questionnaire for use in assessing civil registration coverage in approximately 120 population censuses to be conducted in the 2019-2024 period. It will also support targeted capacity building for national statistical offices on generating vital statistics from civil registration, and it will train a new cadre of young population data scientists who are now in very short supply.
Research in four to five focus countries will examine the root causes and the social and economic consequences of non-registration of vital events for women, specifically the under-registration of female deaths; evaluate the benefits of communication interventions and new technologies at the community level to improve registration of vital events; and investigate the impact of coupling innovative digitization and evidence-based social and behaviour change interventions on birth, marriage, and death registration completeness. This information will help boost the demand for civil registration and vital statistics as a means to secure the rights of women and children.
Expected outcomes include new tools, methodologies, and technical guidance to assess coverage and measure the completeness of birth, marriage, and death registration; increased capacity of national statistical offices to analyze and use data from incomplete civil registration coverage; and a cohort of young researchers in statistics who are able to support future country-level programs and initiatives.
