Emergencies like the current COVID-19 pandemic are disruptive for the provision of civil registration services. The current pandemic has shown the vulnerabilities of the civil registration system when actually the services are required the most.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that current civil registration systems in many African countries are not fit for purpose. First, most of those systems have been negatively affected by lockdown measures at a time when they are needed more than ever. Secondly, most civil registration offices have not drawn up business continuity plans and have struggled to continue their operations.

Thirdly, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause havoc across Africa and beyond, the importance of well-functioning civil registration and vital statistics systems has become clear, as governments must continuously monitor mortality by cause, gender and place of occurrence in order to develop effective interventions, and must draw up and implement effective public health policies that can provide rapid responses to emerging outbreaks in affected areas.

The responses from the rapid assessment conducted by the United Nations Legal Identity Agenda Taskforce in April 2020 showed that the reactions by governments differed across countries ranging from total shutdown, partial provision of services or “deprioritization” of registration of some vital events to uninterrupted services. Access to civil registration has been hindered as a result of social distancing, restricted movement, and general apathy by the populace to go to registration centres and closure of local government services.

A fully-functional and complete CRVS system provides real-time data and is the gold standard for measurement of mortality in a population which is crucial during the pandemic. Data on new cases and deaths on a daily or weekly basis has been critical to show the trends and impact of the pandemic. Therefore, there have been heightened expectations of national statistical systems to provide data needed to manage the crisis including its socio-economic effects.

The following factors are guide the building of resilient civil registration and vital statistics systems in Africa that provide innovative, integrated and decentralized services for the post-COVID-19 period.

1. Leadership in transformation

The development of robust civil registration systems is a multi-sectoral undertaking that requires the participation of a wide range of stakeholders including, first and foremost, members of public. Critical to improvements in that regard are robust governance mechanisms, strong technical and political leadership and effective coordination among governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.

Accelerating progress towards universal civil registration and the establishment of integrated identity management systems will accelerate progress on over 70 targets across the 12 Sustainable Development Goals. Establishing integrated identity management systems requires a whole of government approach, backed by political support for a coherent and coordinated response across multiple government systems.

2. Innovation

Civil registration and vital statistics systems must harness the potential of widely-available innovative technologies. The use of mobile phones in data collection and management, for example, has significant potential to enhance the operational efficiency of civil registration systems across Africa, and is widely-viewed as a game-changer. Furthermore, the roll-out of automated services can reduce the face-to-face interaction required in order to obtain vital event certificates, while moving to online applications for birth and death registration can increase efficiencies by reducing the number of intermediary administrative steps that must be completed. Indeed, digitalization of a wide range of processes, from notification to certification has huge potential for transforming slow, passive, and reactive civil registration systems that depend on in-person attendance into systems that are resilient, proactive and agile.

3. Integration

Countries whose civil registration and vital statistics systems are closely linked to their health sectors have been able to continue providing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some countries have been able to draw on their networks of health facilities and community-based health workers to provide documentation of the occurrence of vital events and to fast track notifications to the civil registrar. Designating health facility staff as informants who can complete vital event notification forms and share them with the civil registrar will help to ensure that key information on vital events is recorded. Maternal and child health services can be leveraged to capture data on births occurring at home when children are brought to child health clinics for immunizations or to receive medical treatment. Furthermore, health personnel should ensure that all children receiving treatment or immunizations have been issued birth certificates. Registrars working at health facilities can also capture vital events as they occur. This is particularly cost-efficient when there are large volumes of vital events to be registered.

4. Decentralization

Decentralization addresses the three most important challenges that impede the operations of traditional civil registration and vital statistics systems, namely the long distances that individuals sometimes need to travel in order to reach a registration centre, the fact that a second visit to the centre is sometimes required to obtain a certificate (or indeed a third visit if a child is born at home), and paper-based processing and record keeping.

One of the key recommendations stemming from the comprehensive assessments of civil registration and vital statistics systems that have been undertaken by numerous African countries has been to increase the number of registration points through decentralization and, in the process, to delegate registration responsibilities to local authorities and national health systems.

Decentralization addresses those challenges by enlarging the scope and responsibilities of the public authorities involved in the registration process. Specific aspects of the registration process, such as notification of births and deaths, are delegated to local authorities and/or health facilities, with the civil registration authority maintaining a supervisory role and designing registration policies for the authorities responsible for delegated aspects of the process.

Civil registration should be classified as an essential service and strategies put into place to ensure business continuity during emergencies, including pandemics. Countries should have a “business continuity plan” on registration of vital events during disruptions such as pandemics, public health emergencies and disasters.

This plan should elaborate the requirements of minimum essential services during the special circumstances, including how to protect the workforce. Registration officials in countries where registration services have been disrupted or completely halted need support to minimize disruption and arrange for resumption of services and management of the backlog when normality returns.

Civil registration offices should prepare contingency plans to meet post-pandemic demand for registration services, working with the legislative branch to manage late and delayed registration penalties. Late registration fees can be waived for a given period of time even during the recovery phase or post-pandemic, in particular in those countries where CR is considered non-essential. Interventions to deal with backlog could include setting up temporary or mobile facilities and expanding staffing, creating awareness of availability of service and waiving fees for a specified period as incentive.

Everyone has the right to be recognized as a person before the law, as enshrined in Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and several other international human rights and humanitarian law instruments. Functioning civil registration systems provide people with legal identity documents starting with a birth certificate that prove their legal status and help to safeguard their rights throughout their lives. This right is non-derogable, meaning it is considered such a fundamental human right that it can never be restricted nor be suspended, even in an emergency. 

In the context of international human rights law, all Member States have the obligation to ensure the legal recognition of individuals in their territory. However, emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, the Ebola crises, displacements caused by natural disasters and conflicts have left people without proof of legal identity and hence the affected people may not be able to acquire a nationality and become stateless. Consequently, women and children may also be forced to resort to participation in the informal labour market, and risk being subjected to extremely poor working conditions, trafficking, sexual exploitation, lack of access to justice, and more.

The following recommendations that are drawn from the United Nations guidelines and learnings from country experiences are made:

• Establishing disaster resilient civil registration systems that can continue to function under precarious circumstances.
• During the crisis, the CR system should be able to adapt and make temporary changes to registration processes, for example, through revision of existing standard operating procedures, business processes or rules to expand eligibility regarding who can notify civil registrars of births and deaths and to establish special processes/waivers for persons who may not have the documents that are required for

registration (particularly considering those who are stateless) etc.

• Planning for handling the expected backlog - peaks are to be expected especially for death registration during the pandemic; however, significant backlog in birth and marriage registration also needs to be addressed
• The vital statistics function needs to be maintained to enable production of timely, accurate and disaggregated small area data for administrative and statistical use.
• Given the nature of pandemics, epidemics and other emergencies, there need to accurately target interventions, it may be essential for civil registration data to be made available for integration with key population datasets e.g. physical addresses and migration data (through a population register) to facilitate communication between governments and individual members of the population.
• Automated methods of data collection that reduce face-face interactions should be used. Digital technology, with extensive use of devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc, has incomparable opportunity for driving the agenda for Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of CRVS systems (APAI_CRVS) and Legal Identity for All on the continent. Emergencies are the best time to fully embrace and implement online and automated systems of registration. If the CRVS systems already offers services remotely, those services should be augmented, and the public should be encouraged to use online registration.
• Privacy and confidentiality of individuals should be maintained. Particular attention should be paid to those groups which may already face discrimination such as hard to reach or marginalized communities (e.g. ethnic and language minorities, refugees and migrants).

The need for partnership with the health sector and particularly linking Civil Registration to maternal and child health services provides continuity of registration of births during emergencies.

Evidence from several African countries has shown that integration, decentralization and digitization, including through the use of innovative technologies, can significantly enhance civil registration and vital statistics systems. African countries that have promoted integration, decentralization and digitization have proven better able than other countries to manage the repercussions of the pandemic, including by being able to continue to provide registration services while also responding to the needs of governments by providing the key data needed in the management of the pandemic. Over the longer term, governments should consider what changes may be required with regard to civil registration laws and regulations. They should, moreover, consider options for strengthening links between civil registration authorities and health services and promoting the use of digital services in ways that respect the core principles of civil registration and uphold the rights of individuals.

1. African Charter on Statistics
2. Strategy for the Harmonization of Statistics in Africa (SHaSA).
3. Integrating civil registration and vital statistics systems and legal identity management in the digital era
4. Taking a holistic approach to legal identity: good practices from integrating civil registration and vital statistics and identity systems around the world
5. Civil registration and vital statistics digitalization and innovation: a perspective from Eastern and Southern Africa –
6. The civil registration and vital statistics systems improvement framework
7. 2018 Yearbook on African Trade Statistics.
8. 2017 Yearbook on African Trade Statistics.
9. The No Name Campaign.