Sample Registration System (SRS)

Many births and deaths go unrecorded in Mali, particularly in rural and remote communities. CVD-Mali, in partnership with Mali’s Ministry of Health and Social Development and the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralization, is developing a transformative health surveillance initiative: a Sample Vital Event Registration System (SRS). The SRS establishes a government-owned, nationally representative surveillance system that captures vital information about births, pregnancy outcomes, and mortality patterns across Mali’s diverse population. The program will provide Mali with its own continuous evidence base for understanding population health, enabling data-driven interventions and tracking progress toward national and global health goals for decades to come.

A bridge to better data, better health

The SRS strengthens Mali’s civil registration system while simultaneously providing the health intelligence the nation needs now. By maintaining continuous surveillance of births, pregnancies, and deaths in representative communities across the country, the program complements formal registration while delivering actionable information that saves lives.

We cannot save lives that we don’t know exist. The SRS ensures that every birth is counted, every pregnancy outcome is documented, and mortality and morbidity patterns are understood, giving health planners the evidence they need to deploy lifesaving interventions where they will most be needed. Through community health workers and trained enumerators using digital tools, the SRS captures vital events that occur both inside and outside health facilities and uses standardized methods, verbal and social autopsies (VASA) to understand health outcomes and their causes.

The program embodies three core principles: reaching underserved populations that current systems miss (equity), embedding the work within national institutions from the start (sustainability), and integrating seamlessly with existing national platforms (interoperability).

• Enable lifesaving interventions: Provide timely, reliable information on births, pregnancy outcomes, and mortality patterns to identify where health services are most urgently needed and guide targeted interventions.
• Fill critical data gaps: Capture vital events occurring outside health facilities, particularly in rural, remote, nomadic, and conflict-affected communities where surveillance coverage is weakest.
• Strengthen health planning: Generate the population-level evidence needed to allocate resources effectively, plan maternal and child health programs, and evaluate intervention impact.
• Support health equity goals: Enable Mali to track progress toward SDG 3 and other health targets with its own empirical evidence, reducing reliance on external modeling and infrequent surveys.
• Build system capacity: Serve as a bridge between community-based surveillance and formal civil registration, with lessons learned progressively integrated into national health information systems.