Death registration is key to measuring and implementing public health policies, responding to health emergencies and a key component of legal identity. Despite progress, many countries still do not have universal and inclusive death registration systems and measuring completeness is essential to understanding the extent to which these systems may be deficient. However, data on the level of completeness and the number of unregistered deaths is lacking and this paper represents the first attempt to estimate the level of death registration completeness at the regional level. Innovative methods are applied to estimate unregistered deaths in countries for which this data is not reported.

The study estimates that of the approximately 32.1 million deaths in the 58 countries in the region, 23.8 million were reported, resulting in a regional estimate of completeness of 74.3 per cent in 2018. More specifically, the study showed that completeness exceeded 99.9 per cent in 10 countries and was below 50 per cent in 7 countries.

This Brief is part of ESCAP’s work on civil registration and vital statistics funded under the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative (D4H) Project.

Download the full report here.