Death registration on the Kenyan Coast.

District level statistics provide health care planners necessary information for both identifying priority areas and evaluating existing health care programmes. Since 1986 an upgraded civil registration system has been in operation in Kilifi district on the Kenyan Coast. For a one-year period (1992-1993) an independent, prospective surveillance for mortality events in a defined population of approximately 51,000 people was conducted as part of intensive demographic studies. Comparisons between the active surveillance and the civil registration system revealed marked under-reporting of deaths, particularly childhood deaths, to the civil authorities. Consideration needs to be given to methods of increasing the coverage of civil registration or of developing supplementary alternative methods of collecting the same information.