Practical approaches to leveraging the opportunities from the health sector to strengthen birth and death registration
Launched by UNICEF in collaboration with Child Identity Protection (CHIP), this practical guide showcases how the health sector plays a vital role in advancing birth and death registration. The guide among other things highlights the different options for service integration between the health and civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) sectors. This includes embedding birth registration in maternities and immunization desks and death registration into discharge/mortuary procedures and deploying civil registrars in health facilities to provide on-site registration services. It can also include co-locating civil registration offices within or near health facilities and empowering health staff to declare births and deaths or facilitate their declaration. The guide further shows that beyond the four walls of a hospital, community health and other frontline workers are important protagonists in identifying and registering community births and deaths. Helpfully, the new tool, displays both key enablers for success as well as risks to avoid when twinning health and CRVS sectors. CHIP hopes that this step-by-step tool can facilitate the work of Governments as they seek to ensure that every child is immediately registered at birth according to their rights.
