BMJ Global Health Discussion To our knowledge, this is the largest global study on birth registration, which combines data from 9.3 million children in 173 nationally representative DHS and MICS surveys across 67 LMICs countries to examine changes in averages and inequalities in birth registration during the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) and SDG period in a comparative and systematic way. We contend that the wealth and urban/rural inequalities in registration 8 our findings reveal are unfair, unjust and avoidable and therefore represent inequities.12–14 Findings show that although 39 out of 67 countries were able to reduce the average percentage of children without birth registration between 1999 and 2016, such reductions did not occur alongside similar reductions in wealth or urban/rural inequities. Additionally, we show that gender inequities in birth registration at the national level were consistently small at each time point. Bhatia A, et al. BMJ Global Health 2019;4:e001926. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2019-001926 BMJ Global Health: first published as 10.1136/bmjgh-2019-001926 on 16 December 2019. Downloaded from https://gh.bmj.com on 21 July 2025 by guest. Protected by copyright, including for uses related to text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. Figure 2 Annual change in the percentage of children without birth registration between the first and most recent survey in low-­income and middle-­income countries. Country information includes the year of the first and most recent survey used to calculate annual change and the % of children without birth registration at each time point. Lines represent the 14 countries which have achieved complete birth registration coverage (non-­registration<=5%) and bars represent the 53 countries which have not achieved complete birth registration coverage.