VITAL REGISTRATION SYSTEM IN TANZANIA

A Vital Registration System is defined as the total process of collecting information by civil registration or enumeration on the frequency or occurrence of specified and defined vital events, as well as relevant characteristics of the events themselves and the person or persons concerned, and compiling, processing, analyzing, evaluating, presenting, and disseminating these data.

Births registration is the source of Vital Registration data which provides information on place of birth, sex, age and religion of parents, legitimacy, number of previous births and their sexes, father’s occupation and birth place of parents. Death registration gives information on place of death, sex, age, and marital status, number of births, birth place, occupation and cause of death.Similar information is obtained with respect to marriages and divorces. Marriage registration; it involves vital information like date of marriage, year of marriage, place, birth place, sex and age.

Advantages of Vital Registration System in Tanzania;

Creates legal documents which may be used to establish and protect civil rights of individuals, legal documents are recorded under the Ministry of State, President’s Office, Constitutional Affairs and Good Governance (MOCAGG) through Registrar General Office (RGO) which provide analyzed and verified data which may be compiled to givea total number of citizens found in the country.

Essential for setting targets and evaluating social and economic plans, such plans include the monitoring of health and measurement of important demographic indicators of levels of living or quality of life such as the expectation of life at birth and the infant mortality rate, social security, family planning, maternal and child health, nutrition, education and public housing.

Introduction of well planned projects to enhance economic development, various projects are established according to the number of people found in the area, natural resources are utilized effectively to those areas where population growth is verified. For example, in Zanzibar there are various projects established and one of them is the Client of Office of Chief Government Statistician which dealt with the goal of the project in preparing Concept.

Updates the government about population growth, the process of registering the death, birth, marriage and divorce help in addition of physical and social infrastructure such as improvement of transport and hospital in order to give special care to children and community at large. When government collects information they know what is supposed to be improved to the people such as care to children so as to have good health and reducing spread of disease such as kwashiorkor, chicken pox, polio and other disease related to these.

Despite the advantages of vital registration systems in Tanzania, the following are the disadvantages.

Vital registration systems may lead to the collection of inaccurate information, information provided by the people who are not concerned with particular events such as marriages, deaths and births may be wrong because they lack more details depending on someone’s understanding and trust. Also the second hand information lack accuracy since those who offer them are less motivated as there are no incentives.

The systems are costful, as they require permanent structures and personnel to carry out registration activities the exercise becomes expensive due to the reason that experts are supposed to be well paid so that they can run the task effectively. For example Tanzanian registration system if a person wants to be registered in births and marriages he or she must pay for such service and in other way the systems are cost full to government as it supposed totransfer the personnel to the working areas.

Sometimes registrations are done by other officials, the registrations become ineffective to some places because the personnel that are involved to such public services are not experienced to those professionals for the registrations which include birth, deaths and marriage. For examples in Tanzanian the physicians and nurses are involved in the registration so this may lead to the collection of the inappropriate information for the nation.

The systems may lead to the repetition in recording; some of people in some areas may be recorded more than one time for a year depending on the event for instance the case of  marriage that may lead to the repetition of the enumeration of the of the single resident. For example a person may divorce or marry more than once a year whereas in other place a person may not experience a divorce or a marriage within a same single year.

The core challenges of vital registration system in a country level are;

Limited political commitment, in the past years the issue of Vital Registration System has not been brought to the attention of political leaders and policy makers. They dealt with at technical and institutional levels in an uncoordinated manner, with limited efforts in presenting these issues in a comprehensive and through a multi-sectorial approach. Hence, policymakers were largely unaware of the value and importance of civil registration records and the statistics generated from the systems in delivering efficient public services, good governance and developmental planning.

Outdated laws and registration procedures, most African countries have not taken Innovative and proactive measures to improve civil registration laws inherited from colonial times. The rationales and objectives of civil registration laws in many cases do not reflect current social and cultural realities of the countries.

Underdeveloped public administration infrastructure, in most African countries, like Tanzania, development of public administration is urban based where basic public services are mainly provided in towns and major urban centers far from the bulk of the population residing in the rural areas. Availability of public institutions and services at the local administration level is the first requirement for sustainable and cost effective implementation of the civil registration system in a country.

Lack of monitoring and evaluation frameworks, most African countries including those withwell-developed civil registration systems like Zanzibar do not have systematic developed monitoring and Evaluation systems for measuring coverage and completeness of the registration. Many countries have not undertaken systematic assessment or evaluation of the Vital Registration System at any point of time.

Since the vital registration system have failed to achieve the desired goal due to problems it face the government must increase effort to provide education and fund for registration exercise also for improvement of vital registration in rural areas where they don’t have education about the system and they have neglected for long time and pay attention to the spatial problems in rural areas like transportation, distance and communication. Therefore improvement of full time rather than part time registration and put in charge number of scattered localities by visit and investigate vital events occurred since last visit. This will help development of social and economic for easily planning of recourses than using census. 

Generally; vital registration system is very essential method of population data collection as it is applicable in various purposes such as administrative use like providing legal documentary evidence of birth place. It also play role in statistical use for instance estimation of seasonality of population events like migration. This method also has limitations because is not used in many countries especially developing countries since birth and death rate do vary during population data collection.