Registering Births and Deaths in Kenya: Current problems, solution pathways and interventions.

The lack of reliable, timely data on deaths (who, when, what) and births in SSA continues to pose a considerable challenge to estimating intervention needs. Many events across Africa remain invisible to national and international health metrics and health system planners.

Informed health policy requires reliable descriptions of births and the age, sex and causes of death for the entire population. New context-specific evidence is required to understand the challenges that plague CRVS systems in Africa.

I will use a network of surveillance sites in Kenya to answer four related questions: a) What and where are the gaps and inefficiencies in the current civil registration processes? b) What is the true proportion of unregistered births and deaths in Kenya? c) do individuals have the same probability of being registered by CRVS when they are born or when they die? and d) Why are some births or deaths not registered and are these events systematically different, and what are the potential opportunities and strategies to strengthen registration of all children.

This body of work will inform the design of an intervention package aimed at improved monitoring of changes in mortality and natality and demonstrate how to achieve comprehensive CRVS in Kenya