REGSTRATION OF VITAL EVENTS

This assignment shall submit a literature review on the registration of vital events. It will show
the historical development, legal provisions, organization and problems of the registration of
vital events. It will then show the lessons that Zambia can learn after which a conclusion will be
drawn.

According to Siegel and Swanson, (2004) Vital statistics systems are designed primarily to
accomplish the registration of vital events. Vital statistics are the statistics derived from
compiling vital events. Registration of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces were originally
intended to meet public and private needs for permanent legal records of these events, and these
needs continue to be very important. However, equally important are the demands for useful
statistics from the fields of public health, life insurance, medical research, and population
analysis.

In addition, Siegel and Swanson (2004), state that a vital statistics system is the total process of
(a) collecting information through civil registration or enumeration on the frequency of
occurrence of specified and defined vital events, as well as relevant characteristics of the events
themselves and of the person or persons concerned, (b) Compiling, processing, analyzing,
evaluating, presenting and disseminating these data in statistical form. The main source is civil
registration, supplemented by data from population census, sample surveys and administrative
records.

Siegel and Swanson (2004), explained the chronology of important events in the development of
civil registration and of the vital statistics. The earliest record of a register of households and
persons came from the Han dynasty of China during the 2nd century BC. The registration of
households in Japan began much later, in the 7th century AD, during the Taika Restoration. It
was noted that the recording of marriages, christenings, and burials in parish registers developed
as an ecclesiastical function in Christendom but gradually evolved into a secular system for the
compulsory registration of births, marriages, deaths, and so on that extended to the population
outside the country’s established church. The 1532 English ordinance that required weekly “Bills
of Mortality” to be compiled by the parish priests in London is a famous landmark. In 1538,
every Anglican priest was required by civil law to make weekly entries in a register for weddings
and baptisms as well as for burials, but these were not compiled into statistical totals for all of
England. In fact, it was not until the Births, Marriages and Deaths Registration Act became
effective in 1837 that these events were registered under civil auspices and a central records
office was established. Registration of vital events began relatively early in Protestant
Scandinavia; the oldest parish register in Sweden goes back to 1608. Compulsory civil
registration of births, deaths, stillbirths, and marriages was enacted in Finland (1628), Denmark
(1646), Norway (1685), and Sweden (1686). The first regular publication of vital statistics by a
government office is credited to William Farr, who was appointed compiler of abstracts in the
General Register Office in 1839, shortly after England’s Registration Act of 1837 went into
effect.

For the Far East, Taeuber (1959) generalised that the great demographic tradition of that region
was that of population registration. The practice began in ancient China with the major function
being the control of the population at the local level. Occasionally, the records would be
summarized to successively higher levels to yield population totals and vital statistics.
The family may have been viewed as the basic social unit in this system of record keeping. In
theory, a continuous population register should have resulted, but in practice, statistical controls
were usually relatively weak and the compilations were either never made or they tended to
languish in inaccessible archives. The Chinese registration system diffused gradually to nearby
lands. Japan’s adaptation of the Chinese system resulted in the koseki, or household registers. In
1721, an edict was issued that the numbers registered should be reported. Such compilations
were made at 6-year intervals down to 1852 although certain relatively small classes of the
population were omitted. Thus, the use of the population register paralleled that in Scandinavia
in the same centuries. Done….

For the registration of vital events to be effective there also needs to be legal provisions.
The continuous, permanent recording of vital events can best be ensured by means of proper
legislation and the establishment of mechanisms to enforce it nationwide. The legal framework is
an essential component for the efficient management, operation and maintenance of the
registration system. Countries should ensure that it is up to date since it provides the rules and
regulations needed to continuously and permanently register events that affect the civil status of
individuals. It also defines the administrative structure, the roles of different agencies and times
possibilities for the collection of information, the production of vital statistics and the use of
information to perform their duties. The civil registration law, a component in the legal
framework, should specifically provide clear guidelines on the type of organizational structure
adopted for the civil registration system in the country or area and the rights and obligations of
all parties in carrying out its provisions. It should cover the types of vital events that must be
registered, their definitions, the designation of informants for each type of event, the time
allowances for registering each type of vital event, procedures for late registration, the registrars’
duties, the penalties for non-compliance, storage and the preservation of records. Provision for
confidentiality of information and protection of privacy of individuals should also be contained
in the civil registration law, who shall be entitled to copies of vital records and who shall have
access to information from the register about individuals other than themselves should be clearly
described in the law or in supporting regulations. Included in these provisions should be
appropriate mechanisms for the transfer of vital records files among government agencies for
authorized purposes, and procedures for access or release of files for approved research,
consistent with the overall confidentiality protections, particularly to the vital statistics system
for the production of continuous vital statistics, (Siegel and Swanson, 2004). Done….

When it comes to organizing the civil registration system, it can be organized into either a
centralized or decentralized system. The International Institute for Vital Registration and
Statistics (2001) state that a centralized system is where the regional or the local registration
offices are part of the same Ministry or Department as is the national registration office, whilst a
decentralized system is where the regional or the local registration offices are part of another
Ministry or Department. According to Siegel and Swanson (2004), a centralized system should
have a central agency with national responsibility for directing, coordinating and monitoring the
nationwide civil registration work. An office with such duties can promote national standards
and uniform registration procedures for all vital events occurring within the country and among
all groups of the population. Under this central arrangement, the national registration agency
should exercise both administrative as well as technical direction over the network of sub-
national and local civil registration offices. It should establish the local registration offices,
provide written materials to local registrars to guide their daily work, coordinate the registration
procedures throughout the system, and supervise and evaluate the registration work of the local
offices to satisfy legal and statistics requirements. The central office should be responsible for
coordinating with other governmental agencies that support the civil registration system,
including the health services that may certify or otherwise report the occurrence of vital events,
the courts that deal with marriages and divorces, and the statistical service that compiles the
registration data and publishes vital statistics.

They went on to state that in a decentralized system, civil registration can be administered at the
level of the major civil divisions, such as the state, province or department. At the capital city or
town of each major division, a central civil registration office should be established to direct and
monitor the civil registration work of the major division. Many countries with a federated
political system, a large territory or large population can adopt a decentralized administration for
civil registration. Countries with a decentralized system for civil registration should adopt
uniform legal provisions and procedures for civil registration. Many countries having
decentralized systems have made provisions to outline a model law and its regulations so that
each major civil division may promulgate its own laws and regulations but in close conformity
with the recommended model. There should be an agency at the national level to enforce
minimum standards or to work cooperatively with the decentralized offices to ensure generally
uniform practices and procedures of civil registration and comparable vital statistics throughout
the country.

In the civil registration system there are people with responsibilities to Inform and report on the
vital events. Unavoidably individuals experiencing these vital events are expected to inform the
relevant authorities of the events having happened because without them knowledge of these
events would be difficult to obtain. Whilst on the reporting end, Siegel and Swanson (2004)
state that the local civil registrar is the official authorized by law to register the occurrence of
vital events and to represent the legal authority of government in the field of civil registration.
Since registration functions involve the general public on a daily basis, the local civil registrar is
responsible for maintaining a good relationship with the community. The efficiency and
completeness of registration is contingent upon the capability, attitude and expertise of the
registrars in the fulfillment of their obligations. For a civil registration system to be successful
and serve the needs of the general public, local civil registrars must have full-time employment,
enjoy the status and benefits of the civil service and be adequately paid for their work. In some
countries where the civil registration system has not been adequately developed or where the
number of vital events is small, local civil registrars may not have enough registration activities
to fully occupy their time. In such a situation, the system should ensure that they should be
available on a regular basis, as required. Registrars must have recognition and standing in the
communities they serve to enable them to carry out their responsibilities faithfully and to keep
themselves informed of vital events as they occur through cooperative arrangements with
knowledgeable persons, such as personnel in hospitals, clinics and health centres, including
funeral directors, church officials and court clerks. Done…….

Siegel and Swanson (2004) make it clear that to meet official statistical needs, the registrars must
ensure the completion and forwarding of a statistical report for each vital event registered or
otherwise provide the required data in an acceptable format (e.g., in electronic form) to the
appropriate authorities charged with the compilation of vital statistics. The civil registrar, as a
public servant, is expected to faithfully carry out the provisions of the law and all applicable
rules and regulations. Penalties should be spelled out in the law if the registrar: fails to register a
vital event or its characteristics reported by the informant; loses, damages or alters any registered
records or permits such loss, damage or alteration to occur; fails to provide adequate protection
of privacy and confidentiality to registrants; has been found guilty of violating the provisions of
the civil registration law or its rules and regulations. Done….

The registration of vital events is done at either the place of registration or place of occurrence,
Place of occurrence is the geographic location in the country, locality or major division, where
the live birth, death, delivery of a dead foetus, marriage or divorce occurred. This information
should be given in detail to enable tabulations to be made for at least the largest administrative
subdivisions of the country and for the smaller administrative subdivisions as may be required
for national use, and also to enable urban or rural distribution to be included in tabulations where
required. Whilst the place of registration is the geographic location in the country of locality or
major civil division where the live birth, death, delivery of a dead foetus, marriage or divorce is
registered into the civil registration system. This information should be indicated in enough
detail to identify each specific registration office for a variety of administrative purposes,
including following back for clarification of registration and statistical reporting problems.
(Siegel and Swanson, 2004)

Siegel and Swanson (2004), go on to mention that registration of vital events by place of
occurrence facilitates and accelerates the registration process. However, registration by place of
residence gives a better picture about the demographic changes in the resident population.
Fortunately, the two criteria are not exclusive of each other. First of all, most vital events tend to
occur in the place of residence itself. Second, in the recording of information it is important to
obtain both place of occurrence and place of residence. Therefore, tabulations by both places can
be produced. DONE……..

The time allowed for registration is the period of time within which the informant must report the
occurrence of a vital event and its characteristics to the registrar. A shorter period of time
allowed for registration is preferable to a longer one. A principal reason for this preference is that
the informant may forget details of the event or may fail to report the event when the period
allowed is too long. Such problems lead to misreporting or under-reporting of events. A grace
period of up to one year after the event has occurred may be allowed for extenuating
circumstances. The registration of vital events has to be done in a timely, periodic fashion but
scheduled to allow sufficient time to secure a maximum number of registrations and to check and
verify the completeness and accuracy of reported data. At the same time, the schedule for
submitting the statistical reports or data should allow the statistical authorities sufficient time to
produce the needed current vital statistics, (Siegel and Swanson, 2004).

Contents of statistical methods(speak less)

For national and subnational purposes, an annual programme of tabulation of vital statistics
should provide data classified in accordance with needs for the study of the incidence, patterns,
time trends and geographic differentials of the most important characteristics and determinants of
fertility, mortality, foetal mortality, nuptiality and divorce, together with the exploration of their
interrelationships. In addition, the programme should include tabulations needed for
administrative purposes to evaluate the quality of vital statistics, including the completeness and
timeliness of registration and the accuracy of the content of the registration records (or the
reporting forms for statistical purposes, as the case may be). The tabulation programme should
also seek to meet the requirements of international agencies and, wherever possible, conform
with recommendations for achieving international comparability.

Information on place of usual residence should be collected in enough detail to enable

tabulations to be made for the smallest geographic subdivisions of the country required by the
tabulation plan and also for those residents and nonresidents. To satisfy the requirements of the
geographic classifications recommended in the tabulations contained in the annex, information is
needed for both minor civil divisions and localities. Places of residence used for tabulations
should coincide with those used for tabulation of places of occurrence. Furthermore, if the
information source is the civil registration system, the places should coincide with those in the
population census database in order to allow the calculation of vital statistics rates (see also
locality (topic 4) and urban and
rural (topic 5)).
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For example, civil registration data, in addition to their legal uses to establish the facts of birth
and death on an individual basis, become important tools for government activities such as the
issuance of passports, establishment of eligibility for school enrollment, social security and other
social entitlements, health programs, clearance of deceased persons’ names from voter
registration and other official
lists, and for such applications as intercensal population estimation and the production of
national demographic and vital statistics. In addition to the placement of the national registration
authority, registration systems may be centralized or decentralized
What is really important is that there exists a clear chain of command
with respect to registration matters from the director of the national registration office
down to the local registrars. The International Institute for Vital Registration and Statistics
(2001):
PROBLEMS
There are many problems faced by the registration of vital statistics. The fact that the vital record
is a legal document limits the amount and kind of non-legal information that can be included in
it. The method is also affected by the number and variety of persons involved in registering the
events. For example, birth registration in some countries requires actions by thousands or
millions of individual citizens and hundreds of local officials. Thousands of physicians, nurses,
or hospital employees may be involved, and all of these people have other duties that they
consider more urgent. It seems inevitable that for the most part these many and diverse persons
will have less training and expertise in data collection than the enumerators who interview
respondents in censuses or other population surveys, (Siegel and Swanson, 2004).

Lack of timely availability of vital statistics data has been a chronic problem in countries all
around the world. Part of this problem is unavoidable since there is a time lag built into the
collection of birth registration information. Informants are given a legally specified time period
after an event occurs to report to the local registrar. Therefore, in order to include as many events
as possible in the annual tabulations, the statistical office must wait after the end of a calendar
year not only for the informants’ legal reporting period to pass but also for the registered
information to be sent from the local registrars to the central office and prepared for tabulation.
Furthermore, in countries where there are large numbers of delayed or late registrations,
tabulation may be additionally delayed in order to maximize the number of events to be counted
in the appropriate year of occurrence, (The International Institute for Vital Registration and
Statistics, 2001).

Other problems include cases of some areas where there is a system of "voluntary" registration.
Such a system results in the registration of only a fraction of all births and deaths. There is no
known instance of voluntary registration of vital events that has even remotely approached
completeness. Also a rural population thinly dispersed over a wide area, in which there are few
doctors available such that many of the deaths occur without a physician in attendance,
registration is likely to be incomplete. The imposition of fees for the registration of births may
tend to discourage registration, this maybe particularly important among poor people, if the
registration fee amounts to a significant proportion of their dally earnings. Social customs
sometimes may lead to non-registration, in areas where a stigma is attached to illegitimate births,
there may be a deliberate attempt on the part of the mothers to avoid reporting them, or to report
them as legitimate. Births reported as legitimate the population estimates and the balancing
equation are not affected, but any analyses of marital fertility will be somewhat in error.

Lessons learned

Zambia as a developing country has got much to learn from the registration of vital events.
According to …………..Zambia like many other African countries should be encouraged to
establish expert teams to critically review their national civil registration systems in terms of the
legal framework, organizational issues, system design, training needs and quality control issues.
Country level expert teams should examine the feasibility of innovative approaches such as
sample registration systems and verbal autopsy questionnaires should be used as interim
measures to obtain data for policy and planning. .(Improving death registration and statistics in
developing countries: Lessons from sub-Saharan
Africa, 2003)

Political will
Political will is an essential ingredient. The need to revitalise vital registration and statistics must
be placed high on the development agenda. It was political commitment that resulted in the
progress achieved in the South African vital registration system, following the development of a
strategy for improving it (Bradshaw and Schneider 1995). In Ethiopia, absence of a legal
framework had hampered the development of the civil registration system. However, current
political support had led to establishment of the Vital Statistics Registration Study team, which
has the responsibility of overseeing the development of draft Civil Registration Laws, and their
subsequent implementation (Hagos and Geressu 2003).

In order for the civil registration to help policy makers and other stakeholders contribute
meaningfully in Zamia, Hagos and Geressu (2003), state that there needs to be improvements in
the death registration data which require a concerted demand for valid and reliable mortality data
from policy-makers, bureaucrats, social scientists, and health professionals. Short capacity-
building programmes on the importance and uses of data from vital registration systems should
be organised for policy-makers and other government staff. Such programmes can generate the
political and administrative support required to devise and implement reforms in national
registration systems, and subsequently monitor performance, and improve accuracy.

Public awareness
Another lesson Zambia can learn is essential for the civil registration to attain the desired results,
and this is the active public participation in the process of civil registration. Bradshaw and
Schneider (1995) explain that public participation can be increased by public awareness of the
basic purposes of civil registration, and the responsibilities of the citizen and the government
towards it. Linking individual records of civil status to basic citizen’s rights can help increase
awareness, e.g. school enrolment, property transfer mechanisms, and survivor or dependency
benefits. Public cooperation can be actively solicited through linking vital records to respect for
human rights. At the same time, the State has an obligation to provide the necessary
organisational structure, sound legal framework, and adequately trained staff. Innovative
approaches are available for enhancing public awareness. In Zimbabwe, mobile registration
campaigns are conducted occasionally, waiving certain fee liabilities for delayed birth and death
registration. In South Africa, there have been attempts to develop an unofficial notifier system
involving midwives, nurses, graveyard attendants, schoolteachers and religious officials, which
would increase community participation through increasing awareness and enabling people to
become part of the registration process. In many countries, mass media campaigns use
newspapers, radio and television to promote public awareness of citizens’ rights and
responsibilities towards registration of births and deaths. Thus if all this is being implemented in
other African countries it can easily be the case with Zambia.

Lastly Linder and Moriyama (1984) explain that to address relatively difficult problems: such as
widely dispersed populations, lack of adequate infrastructure to provide services, and illiteracy.
The Solvable problems would require large amounts of funding hence staff development, office
space, record storage/retrieval facilities, essential forms and supplies require significant capital
and running investments, and these may be substantial enough to set up a comprehensive vital
registration system.

Conclusion

In conclusion there needs to be a strong public commitment, sufficient funding, political will,
and well knowledgeable policy makers to ensure that the information obtained translates into
well meaningful policies to address the problems being faced by the society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taeuber, I. B. (1959): “Demographic Research in the Pacific Area.” University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.

Jacob S. Siegel David A. Swanson (2004): The Methods and Materials of Demography,
Elsevier Academic Press, San Diego.

The International Institute for Vital Registration and Statistics (2001): Organization and Status of
Civil Registration and Vital Statistics in English-speaking
Countries of the Caribbean

Hagos S. and Geressu T. 2003. “Country presentation on Vital Registration in Ethiopia”, Paper
presented atWHOWorkshop on ‘Minimum Data Set Version 1.0
on Ageing and Adult Mortality Data in sub-Saharan Africa’. Pretoria, South Africa,
12–14 Feb, 2003.
Bradshaw, D. and Schneider M. 1995. Vital registration and statistics in South Africa:
Case study metropolitan Cape Town. Cape Town: Medical Research Council.

Linder F.E. and Moriyama I.M. (eds). 1984. Improving Civil Registration. Bethesda:
International Institute for Vital Registration and Statistics.