Project profile — Innovative Approaches to Birth Registration for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health

This project seeks to increase the registration of children under the age of five, and improve the availability, quality, timeliness, and use of health information to assist in the planning of effective activities to improve maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH). The project also seeks to improve the availability and quality of information on child mortality to better inform planning and resource allocation, and increase accountability to MNCH efforts. The project assists developing countries to increase number of birth registrations by addressing access barriers, including reaching those who live in rural areas by mobilizing community health workers in the birth registration process. The project also seeks to use innovations, such as SMS technologies, to increase the number of births being registered. This project supports two key recommendations from the United Nations Commission on Information and Accountability for Women and Children's Health: (i) to take significant steps to establish a system for registration of births, deaths and causes of death, and have well-functioning health information systems; and (ii) to integrate the use of information and communication technologies in national health management information systems and health infrastructure.

The expected outcomes for this project include: (i) improved birth registration through development of action plans with national governments; (ii) strengthened capacity of community health workers and other community-based providers to facilitate birth registration and death notification; (iii) improved use of innovations to reduce existing barriers to registrations; and (iv) integration of community-based reporting in the health information management systems.

Results achieved as of the end of the project (December 2018) include: IN ETHIOPIA: (1) the project supported the development and roll-out of the first national Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) programme; (2) the project was effective in improving CRVS data quality and its use for decision-making, and increasing birth registration and interoperability between CRVS and health; (3) 14,796 civil registrars were trained among the five project target regions; (4) in the project target regions, 88.5% of civil registration centres are functional; and (5) the project’s advocacy efforts contributed to the Government of Ethiopia enacting an Amendment to the Vital Events and National Identification (ID) Proclamation, which extended the scope of the CRVS programme to include refugees and asylum seekers. IN SOUTH SUDAN: (1) the project’s key achievement for South Sudan was its contribution to the enactment in 2018 of the first ever CRVS law in the country: the Civil Registry Act; (2) although the project did not lead to registration of children, it created an enabling environment for birth registration with more than half a million children under 5 having their births notified in a digital health database. Birth notifications are now integrated with other child protection activities including family tracing and reunification, and psychosocial support; and (3) community volunteers were trained to issue birth notifications. IN MALI: (1) the project contributed to Mali becoming the first francophone country to complete the African Program for Accelerated Improvement (APAI)-CRVS Comprehensive Assessment; (2) community-level data on newborn, child and maternal health was integrated into one reporting platform called DHIS2. It was deployed in 355 rural community health centres, of which 265 in emergency affected regions; and (3) digital solutions (RapidPro) were put in place to support real time birth registration data transmissions and aggregation. IN SENEGAL: (1) the project contributed to a 6% increase of nation-wide registration births of children under 5 (72.7% in 2014 to 77% in 2017) demonstrating the success of multi-sector collaboration; (2) civil registration corners were set up in 197 health facilities; (3) digital solutions (RapidPro) were put in place to support real time birth registration data transmissions and aggregation; and (4) progressive data quality improvement was seen through data quality audit, supervision and programme reviews.