EVALUATION OF A SPECIAL-TYPE VITAL STATISTICS REGISTRATION SYSTEM IN A RURAL AREA OF NIGERIA

A special type of vital statistics registration system consisting of the use of house visitors to collect information during fortnightly visits to all houses in the town has existed in lgbo Ora a rural town in Nigeria since 1964. The system replaced the conventional one which had not worked satisfactorily there as in many other parts of Nigeria. The present study reports an evaluation of the completeness of the new system in 1974 the tenth year of the programme. Methodology of evaluation included a complete house to house enumeration of the town, the application of Brass's new method of correcting death registration - the ny/Py versus dy/Py method and the technique of Fargues and Courbage as well as the use of birth order statistics in assessing completeness of birth registration. Results show that registration of births was about 95% complete while that of total deaths was about 87%. Registration of infant deaths aged under one year was much worse being only about 49% complete. There is suggestion that even then this system has done much better than the conventional one in having attained these levels of completeness in only 10 years. The study also confirms widely held impressions about the over enumeration of the 1963 census at least in lgbo Ora; and some weakness of the technique of Fargues and Courbage as a method of evaluating death registration. © 1979 Oxford University Press.