The National Health Institute (INS) guarantees that it has completed the installation of a vital events surveillance system within communities to capture deaths that occur and escape the civil registration system.

According to the director of the National Health Institute, Eduardo Samo Gudo, the initiative comes in response to the low rate of registration of vital events (births and deaths) in communities across the country, a general reality on the African continent, where it is estimated that only 20% of births and deaths are captured by the registry and notary services.

Recent information indicates that around 50% deaths are unregistered and 12 million Mozambicans also lack registration with the Ministry of Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs, at a time when access to data on new births and deaths in rural areas remains a headache for the authorities.

"We have experience in mortality surveillance systems. It is known that civil registration systems for deaths and births in poor countries like Mozambique do not capture the majority of deaths and it is thought that less than 20% are captured across the continent", said Eduardo Samo Gudo, quoted by AIM.

The source also added that the INS has set up a surveillance system in the country that consists of trips to communities to map vital events, which makes it possible to reliably calculate mortality rates, at a time when only data from registries and notaries is used, a factor that does not make it possible to accurately assess the reality of mortality.

"We're sharing this experience at the Conference on Public Health in Africa, because many countries don't have a mechanism of this kind and only use data from civil registers, and as we know, they capture very little about the mortality rate. Many people are born and die in the community and the systems don't capture it," he said, stressing that the initiative also makes it possible to capture deaths in the community due to other diseases that we didn't really know about, using a mechanism called Verbal Autopsy.

"The survey makes it possible, based on questions about symptoms and the length of time the individual had the disease, to ascertain the causes of death. The answers to the survey are then submitted to an algorithm that allows us to determine the probable cause of death of a given individual," he concluded.