• Carla AbouZahr, John Cleland, Francesca Coullare, Sarah B Macfarlane, Francis C Notzon, Philip Setel, Simon Szreter, Monitoring of Vital Events (MoVE) writing group, Robert N Anderson, Ayaga A Bawah, Ana Pilar Betrán, Fred Binka, Kanitta Bundhamcharoen, Rene Castro, Timothy Evans, Ximena Carrasco Figueroa, Chakkalackal Korah George, Laragh Gollogly, Rogelio Gonzalez, Danuta Rajs Grzebien, Kenneth Hill, Zhengjing Huang, Terence H Hull, Mie Inoue, Robert Jakob, Prabhat Jha, Yong Jiang, Ruy Laurenti, Xiaoyan Li, Denise Lievesley, Alan D Lopez, Doris Ma Fat, Mario Merialdi, Lene Mikkelsen, Jyh Kae Nien, Chalapati Rao, Keqin Rao, Osman Sankoh, Kenji Shibuya, Nadia Soleman, Susan Stout, Viroj Tangcharoensathien, Paul J van der Maas, Fan Wu, Gonghuan Yang, and Siwei Zhang.
• Health Metrics Network, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. abouzahrc@who.int
• Lancet. 2007 Nov 24;370(9601):1791-9.

AbstractGood public-health decisionmaking is dependent on reliable and timely statistics on births and deaths (including the medical causes of death). All high-income countries, without exception, have national civil registration systems that record these events and generate regular, frequent, and timely vital statistics. By contrast, these statistics are not available in many low-income and lower-middle-income countries, even though it is in such settings that premature mortality is most severe and the need for robust evidence to back decisionmaking most critical. Civil registration also has a range of benefits for individuals in terms of legal status, and the protection of economic, social, and human rights. However, over the past 30 years, the global health and development community has failed to provide the needed technical and financial support to countries to develop civil registration systems. There is no single blueprint for establishing and maintaining such systems and ensuring the availability of sound vital statistics. Each country faces a different set of challenges, and strategies must be tailored accordingly. There are steps that can be taken, however, and we propose an approach that couples the application of methods to generate better vital statistics in the short term with capacity-building for comprehensive civil registration systems in the long run.

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