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National Population Commission(NPC), has lamented that not more than 10per cent of deaths are registered in the country annually.
Mr. Nasir Isa Kwarra, Chairman, National Population Commission, who disclosed this on Monday in Abuja at the strategic partners’ meeting to co-create a digital civil registration and vital statistics roadmap,also revealed that only 43per cent of the estimated five million children born annually in Nigeria are registered at birth.
Kwarra represented by the Federal Commissioner representing Kano State, Dr. Suleiman Is’maila, noted that in spite of the fact that the Commission has at least five registration centres in each of the 774 Local Government Areas across the country, that the registration coverage still remains very low.
To bridge the gap in Civil Registration and Vital Statistics(CRVS), Kwarra said the Commission was going into full digitisation and automation of the CRVS.
He explained that objective of the digitalization and automation of the CRVS, he said, was to enable data end users have access to real-time data as well as meet up with international best practices.
He said: “There is no doubt that we are in a digital age. A fully functional digitised and automated CRVS system will provide real-time data and is a gold standard for generating birth and mortality data in a population.
“Currently, the Commission has at least five Registration Centres in each 774 LGAs of the Federation and working towards the establishment of at least 10 functional functional Registration Centres to bring up the number to 15 per Local Government Area.”
He further disclosed that the Commission had developed a 5-year National Strategic Action Plan on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems(2018-2022), adding that the Plan identified and spelt out feasible and measurable interventions intended to reposition the CRVS system by 2022.
He advocated the need for improved funding and better legislation to achieve more coverage of CRVS and generate quality data for national planning and development.
He further appealed to Nigerians to use the opportunity that would be provided by the full digitilisation and automation of CRVS to register every single birth and death that occurs in their families at the nearest registration centres.
Kwarra stated that the Commission has a total of 4,011 functional registration centres across the country, adding that the centres are located in health institutions, maternity homes, traditional palaces, local government secretariats and all NPC state offices.
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