@K_A_A_M thanks for reading this and commenting on LinkedIn!
What do you agree / disagree with?
this is great and I very much agree that we know how to do this (also for death registration)
the only point i would add is that, in addition to making sure that individuals see the value of civil registration (“unlocking basic rights and services is not in line with people’s experiences”), more work can be done to ensure that governments see the value of a fully functional CRVS system across many agencies - such demand from governmnet stakeholders will drive the CRVS system to get further support from within governmnet and enable it to become more active…
Great, point Martin. There is still a gap in global CRVS research for an evidence base of the value of CR to a government - I think, in part, this is because a lot of it hasn’t been realised yet and the potential is there but must be realised. Multi-year research on capturing and monitoring this could be super interesting… Who do you think would fund this?
very much agree
will think about funding options, not sure. UNDP could be an option as this moves into the space of how CRVS connects to good governance
thanks
Two years on — and with SDG 16:9 in view — a pair of vital statistics from the real world demonstrates precisely how wide the gap remains between where we are now and the attainment of continuous, normalised Universal Civil Registration within the next seven years.
Ghana’s Births & Deaths Registry has reported its full-year output for 2023 — 663,223 births and 53,671 deaths were registered. [Source: Ghana News Agency, 6 February 2024]
Based on information published separately by the head of the National Population Council, my best estimate is that this performance represents 55 percent coverage of all the births and 18 percent coverage of all the deaths that were expected in 2023.
Among the many questions this raises:
- Do we really know already how to achieve universal coverage of deaths?
(I’ve sought repeatedly in Product Council meetings to redress the understandable bias toward national data coverage of births and a similar concentration on developing the corresponding functionality in OpenCRVS. I’ve warned that this disparity is potentially fatal to the sustainability of any solution.)
- Is there consensus within this OpenCRVS forum, and among the global CRVS-ID expert community more broadly, as to the “correct” order of precedence in data acquisition between the Civil Registration system and the National Identity Management system?
(This is an inconclusively resolved critical policy choice for Ghana, which I recognise as a possible single point of failure for the country’s entire high-priority effort since 2017 to build a new public digital infrastructure.
Martin (@mbratschi) and I have exchanged thoughts on the underlying principles and the practical implications of the sequencing. He and I share a settled position, but I pose the question here without prejudice.)