The situation is no better for death records. Every year fifty-seven million people die. But perhaps only one-third of these deaths are counted.
And in the least developed countries the rate could be as high as seventy percent.
And that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by Jill Moss. To learn more about civil registration, go to www.51VOA.com.
Birth and death records help governments count populations and know how long people live and what they die from. This information is important for planning schools, hospitals and other services.
Yet the World Health Organization believes that almost forty percent of all births go unrecorded. It estimates that one hundred twenty-eight million babies are born each year. So one way to look at this is to say that every year close to fifty million people are denied legal identities.
