Claudia Wells joined Vital Strategies in 2024 as the managing director for the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Program. Before that, she was director of data and evidence and director of the international hub at Development Initiatives, where she led efforts to address the critical barriers to data use.
Before joining the data for development sector, Claudia spent 15 years working at the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics, where she focused on a range of issues—from the Sustainable Development Goals to environmental statistics and mortality analysis. She was responsible for developing new data and analyses that informed the everyday decisions of the public and provided robust evidence for policymakers.
What is CRVS and how does it affect public health?
In the simplest terms, CRVS is about counting every birth and every death as well as understanding causes of death A fully functioning CRVS system will also capture marriages, civil partnerships, divorces and dissolutions, as well as adoptions. (You can read the United Nations’ detailed definition here.)
The data and statistics we derive from this system are so foundational it is almost difficult to describe. CRVS systems are the backbone of a formalized economy and necessary for supporting democracy. When you combine datasets that count every birth and register every death, while also classifying cause of death, you have a powerful set of information that has the potential to directly save lives and protect livelihoods.
I know this because as a government statistician in the U.K., that is exactly what I used CRVS data to do. I could tell the Department of Health where infant mortality rates looked too high and explore why, or spot worrying trends in drug-related deaths and take policy action to prevent them. I could help the government understand who is most at risk from the impact of cold and hot weather, and where they live. From life expectancies to the impact of a pandemic, understanding public health starts with CRVS data.
What role does CRVS play in achieving gender equity?
The world we live in has been designed and shaped by data. Unfortunately, that data was generally about men. The gap in data on women and those who are gender non-conforming has led to systematic discrimination and has a profound negative impact on the lives of those who are often most overlooked. CRVS plays such an important role to fill this gap so that everyone is counted.
The first step is inclusive and comprehensive birth registration, which is the foundation for ensuring everyone has a legal identity and is able access to public services like health care, education and financial services.
Civil registration can help to address gender inequality by protecting against child marriage, securing inheritance rights and fair divorce, and facilitating access to political participation. Marriage and divorce registrations that are inclusive of all genders provide important legal recognition for protection of property and recognition of parenthood.
Finally, death registration not only provides essential legal documentation, for example, to enable a funeral to take place, but it also informs public health policy through the collection of data on infant and maternal death and preventable causes that have a disproportionate gender burden, such as sex-specific cancers and gender-based violence.
What is the Data for Health Initiative doing to strengthen CRVS systems?
We support governments. They are the beating heart of everything we do. This emphasis enables our work on CRVS systems to be nationally owned, country-led and sustainable. Our technical support focuses on births, death and causes of death, covering a complex ecosystem run by multiple government agencies.
We work across broad intervention areas:
- Providing support to countries to govern and coordinate across all the departments involved in the CRVS process.
- Enabling registration to happen as soon as possible after a birth or death occurs.
- Working to improve systems in hospitals and within communities so that events are accurately recorded, and cause of death is captured.
- Improving medical-legal death data to better identify causes of external and suspicious deaths.
- Working to produce vital statistics by supporting governments to translate this CRVS data into actionable information that can transform people’s lives.
For example, in Bangladesh, Mozambique, Cameroon and Vietnam we are supporting the digital linkage between health records and civil registration, which is improving the thoroughness and coverage of birth and death registration data. This is an essential step toward ensuring that everyone is counted.
Why did you choose to pursue public health, and CRVS in particular?
I don’t think I actively chose public health, instead public health chose me! As a pure mathematician by background, I was always a slightly unusual government statistician. I like to solve things and provide answers like mathematical proofs, and that approach doesn’t lend itself to traditional sample surveys and estimation methods.
But an undergraduate module in medical statistics led me to be placed in the Health and Life Events division of the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics—that is what ignited my passion. Working on mortality data was tangible, inspiring and had a direct impact on the lives of those most in need. Even when I moved to work on poverty and inequality statistics, the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and investments into data for development, my love for CRVS never left me. I cannot describe the joy I feel to be back working on a topic I truly love.
Someone told me that CRVS is the book of life, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I am not a medical doctor, but this is about improving and saving lives—what could be more important than that?
To learn more about Vital Strategies CRVS programming, visit: https://www.vitalstrategies.org/programs/civil-registration-and-vital-statistics/