Overview
Nepal had made significant progress in strengthening its civil registration and health information systems, but key government institutions and development partners were operating through separate systems and coordination mechanisms. While technical capability existed, fragmented governance and parallel support limited the country's ability to fully integrate civil registration, geospatial information and health data.
Aligning Partner Support for Civil Registration and Geospatial Systems in Nepal
Why It Matters
Nepal did not need partners to tell it what to build, it needed partners to stop building around each other. The Strategic Brief worked because it named who owned what, and what each partner's role actually was. That is what turns a mission into something a Ministry can use.
Outcomes
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A single government-reviewed Strategic Brief covering both CRVS and GIS, submitted for accuracy review to the Ministry of Health and Population, the National Statistics Office, and the Department of National ID and Civil Registration, in place of three separate agency reports.
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Eight prioritised, sequenced recommendations spanning legal implementation, health-sector partnership, mortality data quality, vital statistics reporting and GIS coordination, each paired with concrete action points rather than general principles.
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A data governance gap identified beyond the original mission scope, the absence of a dedicated data protection authority in Nepal's legal framework, escalated as a standalone recommendation.
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A three-agency alignment model, coordinating UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO around one shared document, that went on to inform how the Health Data Collaborative approached its two following country missions.
Approach
Rather than treating CRVS and GIS as separate workstreams, the brief was structured around where the two systems needed to meet. The diagnostic mapped Nepal's legal framework, its decentralised registration architecture, and the GIS maturity of each agency, before a single recommendation was drafted, ensuring proposed support built on what Nepal had already achieved. Recommendations were grouped by institutional owner rather than by partner agency, and the interoperability asks were made concrete: standardising on DHIS2, a master unique identifier to link fragmented programme IDs, and formal data-sharing agreements across the four lead agencies.
My Role
I led the design and authorship of the Strategic Brief produced on behalf of UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO, consolidating a joint technical mission into one document for three government counterparts: the Ministry of Health and Population, the National Statistics Office, and the Department of National ID and Civil Registration. My task was to take technical input from specialists in civil registration, demography and GIS and turn it into one diagnostic and one prioritised set of recommendations, not three separate agency reports competing for the same Ministry's attention.
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