Civil Registration and Vital Statistics
Every year, tens of millions of births and deaths go unrecorded—leaving governments unable to identify their health threats and individuals with challenges in accessing healthcare, education or legal rights. Vital Strategies partners with governments in 30+ countries to build the foundational data systems that count every life.
90% of deaths in health facilities in countries supported by Data for Health since 2025 are recorded with a certified cause of death—up from 24% in 2018.
Completed death registrations doubled across nine Data for Health-supported countries between 2015 and 2025.
Vital helped increase the percent of Rwandan facility deaths recorded with a usable cause to 83%, up from 48% in 2019—making data more useful for policy and planning.
With the help of Vital Strategies, 99% of births in Cambodia are now registered—giving every child legal identity, rights and access to services.
Why It Matters
When births and deaths go unrecorded, individuals — especially women, children and people in rural and marginalized communities — lose access to healthcare, education and legal rights. Vital Strategies partners with 30+ governments to build systems that count every life and leave no one behind.
How We Work
We provide technical assistance, embedded staff and digital tools—building government capacity to capture, certify and publish vital statistics.
Working alongside a range of government ministries, including ministries of home affairs and health, and national statistics offices.
Our work spans three interconnected challenges: improving the completeness of birth and death registration (shifting the burden from families to government systems); certifying cause of death accurately, including scaling novel solutions to determine causes of death in places where there is no doctor; and supporting countries to adopt World Health Organization-endorsed standards for medical certification.
For all deaths regardless of setting, Vital leads the Cause of Death Determination Assistant (CODA) consortium—a Gates Foundation-funded AI-powered tool that makes cause-of-death ascertainment faster, more accurate, and less costly.
We also support national statistics offices and ministries of health to extract, analyze and publish vital statistics based on registration records for use in policy and planning.
Throughout, we prioritize country ownership, capacity strengthening, equity and sustainability—ensuring that women, rural communities and historically undercounted groups are fully included.
Areas of Focus
We advance country-owned, country-led improvements across four areas—building the systems that make every life count.
When Everyone Counts
As part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health (D4H) Initiative, Vital Strategies and D4H partners worked with photographer Juan Arredondo to document the global challenge of unrecorded deaths and what becomes possible when everyone counts, in life and in death.
The Life Saving Power of … Paperwork?
A New York Times Magazine article searingly demonstrates the problems associated with inadequate birth and death registries in the low-income nations of Africa and Southeast Asia.
