OpenCRVS has the power to transform the lives
of women and girls. For people to count, they must
first be counted, and that’s what a Civil Registration and Vital Statistics
(CRVS) system does, recording the details of all major life events, such as
births and deaths. Birth registration is the first step in securing legal
identity and accessing other basic rights like education, healthcare and social
protection.
Without this system, a child can’t be issued a birth
certificate, and without this basic document, they don’t exist in the eyes of
the law. This means that children can’t prove their age, and for girls this can
lead to a much higher risk of child marriage. However with an official birth
record, it’s much harder to force girls into early marriage. For girls, this
means they can avoid health issues or even death from early pregnancy. They’re
less likely to suffer domestic violence from husbands and in-laws. And they’ll
get to finish school, giving them better work and career prospects for the
future.
CRVS systems have the potential to prevent
child marriage, enable targeted sexual and reproductive health service delivery
for girls already married, and provide full and equal protection under the law.
When it comes to data, women and girls are
among the most invisible because current data collection fails to reflect the
specific challenges they face – and other data relevant to their lives is not
being captured at all.
OpenCRVS was designed with a gender lens, to
better capture valuable data on women and girls, which can in turn provide
critical evidence for governments to improve policies, services, and
protections that respond to their unique needs, which plays a vital role in achieving
gender equality.
Age verification functionality has been built
into OpenCRVS, which enables marriage registrars and religious leaders to
verify an individual’s age via sms, through their birth registration record,
prior to officiating a marriage. In Bangladesh, this core function
enables the government to uphold recent minimum age of marriage law amendments
and reduce overall rates of child marriage across the country.
CRVS systems also provide the documentary proof
required to access services and protections, like a single parent allowance,
sexual and reproductive health curriculum, or an outreach breast-screening
clinic.