Addressing critical knowledge and capacity gaps to sustain CRVS system development

Abstract

Background: Improving civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems requires strengthening the capacity of the CRVS workforce. The improvement of data collection and diagnostic practices must be accompanied by efforts to ensure that the workforce has the skills and knowledge to assess the quality of, and analyse, CRVS data using demographic and epidemiological techniques. While longer-term measures to improve data collection practices must continue to be implemented, it is important to build capacity in the cautious use of imperfect data. However, a lack of training programmes, guidelines and tools make capacity shortages a common issue in CRVS systems. As such, any strategy to buil..