From the right to vote to reliable population counts, the high number of births and deaths that go unrecorded in the Pacific has generational impacts on both individuals and their country.
A civil registration and vital statistics programme led by the Pacific Community (SPC), supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, sets out to ensure that every Pacific Islander can access services and live longer, healthier lives.
Operating a bank account, enrolling children in school, voting in elections, applying for a passport—daily life depends on having the right paperwork. At the national level, information collected at the end of life addresses causes of death, guiding public health and education efforts.
While North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand achieve near-total registration, about 50% of births and 80% of deaths in the Pacific still go unregistered, with considerable variation across the region—from some countries with 100% coverage, to others below 20%.
Reporting on the causes of death is very inadequate in most countries. Almost all registration systems remain paper-based, with little data-sharing across government departments or the wider region.
In fact, many Pacific Islands have just one or two people in the entire nation working on civil registration and vital statistics—referring to the recording of births, adoptions, marriages, name changes, divorces and deaths, and their flow-on use in official statistics like population estimates.
Failure to formally record a birth has lifelong ripple effects at both individual and government level, explains Mr Jeff Montgomery, a specialist in civil registration and vital statistics with SPC’s Statistics for Development Division, formerly New Zealand’s Registrar-General.
“Civil registration is fundamental to each person’s legal identity,” explains Mr Montgomery.
“Birth certificates serve as official documentation of someone’s name, age and family relationships, while death certificates are crucial for those wrapping up the affairs of a loved one.
“Then, registering individual births and deaths is also essential for understanding a population at a zoomed-out level—to make informed decisions about healthcare provision, the number of schools, everything else in the running of a country.
“Every nation needs good systems for both administrative and statistical goals.”
Pacific-led change with international support
Transforming processes built around people and paper—while still dealing with the daily workload of registering births, deaths and other life events—is often impossible without external assistance. Where highly specialist skills are needed, these are often not available within the country.
The partnership between SPC and Bloomberg Philanthropies is tackling these challenges. Both organisations work with governments and partners to strengthen data on births and deaths—so that individuals can exercise their rights while governments can make evidence-led decisions.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting SPC’s civil registration and vital statistics work as part of its Data for Health Initiative.
The initiative supports low- and middle-income countries to improve public health data and use of data for policymaking. Through the Data for Health Initiative, SPC will expand its help to countries by increasing personnel,enabling more hands-on assistance.
“Our basic approach is to work with countries to undertake an assessment of their collection and reporting systems for births, deaths and causes of death,” Mr Montgomery explains.
“This information is then used to develop an improvement plan that’s specific to them—which might include a business case, for example, or a modernised digital system.
“The partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies has essentially tripled the resources we have to offer our member countries in strengthening their civil registration systems.”
Regional collaboration
The programme also aims to build regional coordination, especially with cause-of-death reporting and access to digital civil registration systems. A meeting of the Pacific Civil Registrars Network is taking place in our member country Fiji this week as a chance to share progress in improvement efforts.
Already, de-identified cause-of-death information is being exchanged between Fiji, Tonga and Tuvalu in a pilot project supported by SPC that sees the countries sharing expertise towards better health outcomes.
And landmark research on the potential to share news of births, deaths and other life events between national agencies and borders was published last year by SPC, aiming to share expertise and data across Pacific countries.
“Increasingly, Pacific people are being born in one country and are dying in another,” Mr Montgomery explains. “Economic and climate factors are likely to lead to additional population relocation in coming years.”
Those working in civil registration need to adopt this broadest, population-level view—while also considering how their processes impact some of the happiest and saddest occasions in people’s lives.
“Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative is moving us further towards every Pacific Islander having the official recognition they deserve, from birth to death, which really means the chance to fully participate in their societies.
“We’re fond of saying that ‘everybody counts’ in civil registration and vital statistics, and this programme is bringing us closer to that goal.”
Read the dynamic story with photography
For more information on this story, contact Mr Ben Campion, Communications Adviser, Statistics for Development Division, Pacific Community (SPC).
