Health Metrics Network: Monitoring Vital Events Resource Kit

To make people count, we first need to be able to count people.

-- Dr. Lee Jong-wook, Director-General WHO (2004-2006)

Timely and reliable information on vital events is the cornerstone of governance and the basic of underpinning of public health. Yet, in most developing countries, monitoring of these events is still lacking: births and deaths go unregistered and causes of death patterns remain poorly understood.

This Resource Kit is intended to aid national agencies, development partners, and technical experts to strengthen the monitoring of vital events by providing easy, user-friendly access to technical documents relating to civil registration, cause of death attribution, sentinel and sample registration with verbal autopsy, and demographic surveillance. The Resource Kit is a compilation of available materials from the World Health Organization, the UN Statistics Division and technical experts around the world.