WHO calls for global civil registration

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has backed a new drive to encourage every country to count all of its births and deaths through civil registration.

The Health Metrics Network, a global body hosted by WHO that was setup to address the lack of health information in the developing world, said that civil registration is the best way for countries to keep track of births, deaths and marital status of their populations.

It noted that doing so would allow for the creation of vital statistics – birth rates, death rates, causes of death – which can be used to measure the effectiveness of health programmes and assess where development aid should be spent.

Dr Sally Stansfield, executive secretary of the Health Metrics Network, said: "The lack of civil registration systems has been partially compensated by surveys, sample registration and surveillance sites.

"These provide some useful information, but they give an incomplete picture of population size and needs. And they certainly cannot give individuals the basic human right to a legal identity that comes from civil registry. It's a major challenge to build civil registration systems: this is the job no one wants."

According to WHO nearly 40 per cent of the world's births are unregistered every year, along with two-thirds of all deaths. The organisation receives reliable cause-of-death statistics from only 31 of its 193 member states.

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