Death registration: Vital to the legal identity agenda

Even if it comes last on the natural pecking order of the civil registration chain, death registration remains an integral and exceedingly important part of legal identity. The process, which simply means the recording of a person’s death by a government or any other authorized body for legal and statistical purposes, is so often ignored especially by countries with weak civil registration systems such as in Africa.
For example, in Cameroon, the Director General of the National Civil Status Registration Office (BUNEC), Alexandre Marie Yomo, disclosed during a panel discussion at ID4Africa 2024 in Cape Town in May that death registration in the country stands at just around 10 percent, reflecting a significantly low motivation from citizens in completing the process. This is despite the high crude death rate in the country.
In Nigeria, the situation is no different, oscillating around the same percentage. According to the National Population Commission (NPC), 49,917 deaths were registered in the first half of 2023 in the country, with just slightly above half of this number of deaths actually certified. This means over 20,000 of the deaths registered were never certified. The agency, which is responsible for civil registration and vital statistics in Nigeria, also mentions that the State of Lagos registered just two percent of all deaths in 2021, representing a pretty low percentage.
Such is the case in almost all African counties and many other parts of the Global South. In fact, the World Health Organization’s SCORE Global Report for 2021 indicated that only four out of ten deaths in the world and only one in 10 deaths in Africa were officially registered, showing an extremely wide gap in mortality data. Also, the UNDP estimates that only 68 percent of countries, territories and areas register at least 90 percent of deaths which have occurred, while just 15 percent of the world’s population is found in countries where at least 90 percent of births and deaths are registered.
Why death registration is crucial
According to UNICEF, death registration entails the continuous, permanent, compulsory, and universal process for recording all occurrence of deaths. Apart from helping countries understand and monitor public health trends, effective death registration is crucial for enabling governments not only to spell out strategic development planning, but also understand health patterns and put in place important policy frameworks.
The World Bank says “CRVS systems are foundational to the UN Legal Identity Agenda. CRVS is the backbone of the ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’ at the heart of legal identity, service access, and social protection.”
The registration of deaths is one of the three core components of the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) process, but why is it so much ignored when it is so important for national planning and the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals?
Accurate death registration improves the quality if CRVS data and supports SDG Target 16.9 to provide legal identity for all, as well as SDGs related to the delivery of social protection (SDG 1) and maternal health services (SDG 3). Despite this, effective systems are absent in many of the world’s countries.
Indeed, various factors account for this, as researchers and experts have found. These include factors such as ineffective and inefficient CVRS systems, lack of awareness among the population, logistical problems, lack of strong legislative and governance frameworks, and unavailability of the right technology, among other factors. Just like births, the registration of deaths is so vital that all countries of the world must treat it as a matter of non-negotiable importance.
This explains why in a policy paper titled “Decade for repositioning civil registration and vital statistics in Africa 2017- 2026,” the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) emphasizes the importance of death registration as a critical event recommend by the United Nations. It notes that because of the legal, administrative as well as statistical purposes which death registration serve, efforts must be made, namely by designing and adopting innovative approaches specific to enhancing the process in Africa.
UNECA highlights that because of the weak and inefficient CRVS systems in Africa, it has together with the African Union, the African Development Bank and other regional partners “developed the Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, which is intended to guide systemic reform and support sustainable progress” on CRVS in Africa.
How to improve the situation
In order to turn the tides and improve death registration figures, especially in Africa, UNECA suggests a number of actions which include reviewing and redoing legal frameworks patterning to death registration, improving technical and administrative capacity to expand and modernize CRVS systems, increasing awareness and sensitization campaigns, building networks of collaborative work and finding ways of reaching remote and difficult-to-access to areas, as well as devising innovative approaches and techniques for data collection on information related to the cause of death.
From the figures and statistics, it is clear that so much work still has to be done to step up death registration around the world. This partly explains why some experts and development organizations such as UNICEF and UNHCR have been pushing for the linking of CRVS and national ID systems as one of the ways of accelerating efficient and sustainable civil registration, including registration of deaths.
As an example, UNICEF’s CRVSID framework makes the case in this regard as it pushes for the full integration of national ID and health systems in order to speed up the rate of birth and death registration in Africa.
The CVRSID framework emphasizes death registration because it sees legal identity as “a holistic and lifecycle-oriented approach, wherein a new legal identity is incorporated into the identity system upon birth registration and is subsequently retired from the system upon the individual’s death following death registration.”
MOSIP and OpenCRVS also recently unveiled a collaboration on supporting the linkage of CRVS and national ID systems, explaining how they are working to facilitate “identity management from birth to death, while eliminating the inefficiencies of traditional siloed systems.”
As the push for legal and digital identity continues, countries must look towards setting up efficient foundational ID systems that facilitate the recording of important life events such as deaths.
Article Topics
civil registration | CRVS | death registration | digital identity | digital public infrastructure | identity management | legal identity | SDG 16.9
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