CRVS robustness - Replication code and datasets

Universal access to legal identity is widely seen as a core component of inclusive societies. SDG 16.9 commits the international community to ensuring “legal identity for all” by 2030. Efforts to monitor progress have been hampered by measurement challenges. Current indicators focus on coverage of specific types of identification, such as birth registration among children or possession of national ID cards among adults. Our analysis demonstrates that these indicators can generate an incomplete and misleading picture. We argue that providing legal identity depends on a robust civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system that not only issues documents, but also continuously verifies core elements of legal identity on the basis of up-to-date records. We conceptualize robustness as a latent quality of CRVS systems and introduce a new empirical measure. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we estimate latent CRVS robustness scores based on birth registration coverage, death registration coverage, CRVS completeness, national ID card coverage, the prevalence of age heaping, and statistical capacity. Our data cover 115 countries in the decade before, and 119 countries in the decade after the adoption of SDG 16.9. They can be used to identity countries and sectors where additional capacity-building support is most needed.