2019 ESARO: Multi-Country Evaluation for Birth Registration for Maternal, Newborn, Child Health (BR4MNCH) Project in Ethiopia and South Sudan

Executive summary

Timely, complete, and accurate data from civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) is critical for ensuring that children realize the rights to which they are entitled across protection, health and a range of other sectors. To enhance birth registration, UNICEF with funding from Global Affairs Canada implemented a birth registration project for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Project (BR4MNCH) in Ethiopia and South Sudan. The BR4MNCH project which was implemented in partnership with UNICEF’s child protection and health clusters is the object of this evaluation. The project was implemented between 2014 and 2018 and had three objectives. namely; a). improve use of health information for maternal, newborn and child health for operational planning, with emphasis on community based information; b). increase registration with the civil registry of births of boys and girls aged 0-59 months and c). improve interoperability between the CRVS and Health Systems. The purpose of the evaluation was “to better understand how and under what conditions the interventions and the activities implemented under the BR4MNCH project are functioning and to assess the extent to which the initiative has met its objectives and achieved expected results”. More  specifically, the evaluation had two specific objectives:

1. To determine to what extent and how the project has achieved its goal of contributing to increasing use of health information, birth registration with the civil registry, and improved interoperability between CVRS and health systems in the project areas of two countries.
2. To identify what worked well, existing bottlenecks and key lessons and come up with feasible recommendations for programmatic and policy decisions for key actors