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. 2018 Dec 27;16(1):21.
doi: 10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6.

How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data

David E Phillips  1 , Tim Adair  2 , Alan D Lopez  2
Affiliations

How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data

David E Phillips et al. Popul Health Metr. .

Abstract

Background: The registration and certification of births has a wide array of individual and societal benefits. While near-universal in some parts of the world, birth registration is less common in many low- and middle-income countries, and the quality of vital statistics vary. We assembled publicly available birth registration records for as many countries as possible into a novel global birth registration database, and we present a systematic assessment of available data.

Methods: We obtained 4918 country-years of data from 145 countries covering the period 1948-2015. We compared these to existing estimates of total births to assess completeness of public data and adapted existing methods to evaluate the quality and timeliness of the data.

Results: Since 1980, approximately one billion births were registered and shared in public databases. Compared to estimates of fertility, this represents only 40.0% of total births in the peak year, 2011. Approximately 74 million births (53.1%) per year occur in countries whose systems do not systematically register them and release the aggregate records. Considering data quality, timeliness, and completeness in country-years where data are available, only about 12 million births per year (8.6%) occur in countries with high-performing registration systems.

Conclusions: This analysis highlights the gaps in available data. Our objective and low-cost approach to assessing the performance of birth registration systems can be helpful to monitor country progress, and to help national and international policymakers set targets for strengthening birth registration systems.

Keywords: Birth certificates; Civil registration; Data quality; Vital statistics.

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Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Percentage of global births registered in publicly-available data
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Vital statistics performance index (most recent year with available data)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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