Stimulating the Demand for Death Registration in Rural Bangladesh: A Randomized Evaluation

Md Mahabubur Rahman, icddrb
Md Tazvir Amin, icddrb
M Moinuddin Haider, Icddr,B
Nurul Alam, ICDDR,B
Stephane Helleringer, New York University Abu Dhabi

In many low-income and lower-middle-income countries, civil registration systems remain incomplete. To fill this data gap, demographers have primarily developed alternative data sources such as surveys and censuses, but these are collected infrequently and they are affected by multiple sources of errors. They also contain less information about the deceased than is typically collected on a death certificate. We thus investigated whether it might be possible to stimulate the demand for death registration among recently bereaved families in a lower-middle-income setting. In Bangladesh, we conducted a randomized trial of a package of interventions designed to raise awareness, and encourage the completion of death registration. During a two-month follow-up period, these interventions did not increase the likelihood of initiating death registration, even though they improved knowledge of registration procedures among households in the treatment group. Future research should develop strategies to ensure that bereaved families perceive death registration as beneficial.

Keywords: Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Data and Methods, Randomized controlled experiments , Gender Dynamics

See paper.