Your OpenCRVS Project
1. Introduction
This section is your guide to implementing OpenCRVS in your country — from the first planning conversations through to running and improving the system in production.
It is organised as a sequence of stages. If you are at the start of your journey, work through them in order; if you are already underway, jump to the stage you are in. Each stage page explains what it involves, what you need to begin, and what it produces for the next stage.
Where to start: if you are beginning a new implementation, start with Project planning and Establish project & team. Everything else builds on those foundations.
2. The implementation journey
A typical OpenCRVS implementation moves through five broad phases: plan and prepare, understand and design, build, launch, and run and improve.
Plan and prepare
Project planning — agree the scope, timeline, budget and approach for the implementation.
Establish project & team — identify the roles and skills needed to set up, configure, run and sustain OpenCRVS.
Understand and design
Gathering requirements — collect and prepare the inputs for an optimal configuration, through desk research, field research, co-design and design & specification.
Solution architecture — decide how OpenCRVS fits into your country's wider, interoperable digital ecosystem.
Build
Configuration — turn the signed-off configuration inputs into a working system.
Launch
Deployment — set up the servers and environments and deploy OpenCRVS.
Migrate legacy data — bring existing civil registration records into OpenCRVS.
Quality assurance — test the configured system against the requirements before go-live.
Go-live — launch OpenCRVS into production use.
Run and improve
Operational support — keep the system running and support users day to day.
Monitoring — track performance, usage and registration outcomes.
Upgrading — keep OpenCRVS up to date with new releases.
3. Who you need
Implementing OpenCRVS is led by a small, multidisciplinary team that grows with the scope of your work — a proof of concept may need only a couple of core roles, while a national programme draws in technical, design, change-management, training and monitoring roles. See Establish project & team for the full set of roles and how to size your team.
Embed your own people. Wherever an implementing partner supports the work, include government staff throughout. Their knowledge keeps the implementation grounded, and their involvement is what makes the system sustainable after handover.
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