Annex VI
List of minimum requirements for vital statistics practices
The Africa Programme secretariat developed the following list of minimum
requirements for vital statistics from civil registration, aligning it with international principles
and practices, as a component of the monitoring and evaluation framework:
(a) Completeness of registration of birth and death is computed regularly, at least on
an annual basis, on the basis of the system itself;
(b) International form of medical certification of cause of death is used and cause of
death coded using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 or 11;
(c) Routine checks are made on overall levels of fertility, mortality, marriage and
divorce derived from the vital statistics data by calculating rates and comparing them over time;
rates are also compared with data derived from other sources, such as censuses and surveys;
(d) Data are published annually on birth and death disaggregated by sex, age and
geographical or administrative region;
(e) The delay between the reference year and the publication of vital statistics based
on the civil registration system is two years at most;
(f) Training on death certification provided to doctors for certifying the cause of death
and a training on the International Classification of Diseases is provided to specialists coding
the cause of death;
(g) There is a routine training schedule for statisticians compiling vital statistics from
civil registration records.
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