Desk research & planning
Desktop research and planning before any fieldwork
1. Introduction
Before you can configure OpenCRVS for your country, you need a working knowledge of how civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) are supposed to work — in law and in procedure. This page covers the first stage of Gathering requirements: the desk research that builds that knowledge, and the planning that turns it into a fieldwork plan.
Doing this well means your time with registrars, health workers and citizens is spent validating and probing the things documents cannot tell you — not on basic discovery. The result is targeted, efficient fieldwork and far better use of your stakeholders' time.
What this stage produces: a baseline understanding of the country's CRVS context, and a ready-to-execute fieldwork plan. Both feed directly into Field Research & Discovery.
When: This is the first stage of requirements gathering and is mostly desk-based. It can begin as soon as your core team is in place. Indicative duration: 2–4 weeks, depending on the number of vital events in scope and how readily the source documents can be obtained.
Before you start, you should have:
a project sponsor and the core team in place — at minimum a Business Analyst and a Technical System Administrator (see Establish project & team)
the list of vital events the implementation will cover (for example: birth, death, marriage — and possibly divorce, adoption or stillbirth)
government agreement to request documents from, and later engage, registry, health and statistics bodies.
2. Desk research
Build your understanding from the documents that define how registration works today, then read them with configuration in mind.
2.1 Collect the existing materials
Gather the official documents listed below. Log anything you cannot obtain so the gap can be filled during fieldwork.
Civil Code / Vital Statistics Act
Legal mandate, event definitions, registration time limits, who must register
Ministry of Justice / Attorney General
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Subsidiary regulations, decrees, circulars
Detailed procedures, fees, late-registration rules
Registrar General's office
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Blank declaration/registration forms (per event)
Data fields collected, ordering, complexity
Registry / health facilities
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Sample certificates (per event)
Legal content, security features, languages
Registry
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Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) / manuals
The intended workflow, actors and handoffs
Registry
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Data-protection law and regulations
Lawful basis, data residency, retention, access rules
Data Protection Authority / Justice
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Existing data-sharing agreements
Current or planned integrations (National ID, health, statistics)
Relevant ministries
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Fee schedule
Registration, certification and late-registration fees, and any waivers
Registrar General's office
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Administrative-boundary and office list
Jurisdictions and office hierarchy
Statistics office / interior ministry
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2.2 Analyse the legal and procedural framework
Collecting the law is not the same as knowing what it requires. Read the documents with one question in mind: which legal parameters will shape the OpenCRVS configuration? Capture each one, and where the answer is unclear or contested, mark it as something to confirm in the field.
The table below maps the parameters that most often drive configuration decisions to the configuration work they feed. Use it as your extraction checklist.
Registration time limit
What is the on-time window per event (for example, 30 days for a birth)?
Workflow branches; late/delayed logic
Late & delayed registration
What evidence, approval or fees apply after the window? When is a court order required?
Conditional fields, scopes, fees
Required vs optional data
What is the legal minimum data set per event?
Form configuration / validation
Supporting documents
What evidence must accompany a declaration?
Form (document upload) requirements
Who may register, approve and certify
Which roles validate, register and sign records?
User roles & scopes; certificate signing
Correction & amendment
Administrative vs court-ordered correction; who approves?
Correction flows; scopes
Certified-copy content & security
What must a certificate show? What security features and languages are required?
Fees & waivers
What is charged, to whom, and who is exempt?
Business rules / configuration
Jurisdiction & hierarchy
Which office serves which area, and what are the reporting lines?
Identifiers
Is a national ID issued at birth? What is the registration-number format?
Integrations; number generation
Languages & scripts
What are the official languages? Are any right-to-left?
Localisation
Notification obligations
Who must be notified of an event (National ID, health, statistics, electoral)?
Integration use-cases
Data protection & retention
What is the lawful basis, residency, retention period, access and audit expectation?
Roles/scopes; non-functional requirements; audit
2.3 Draft a preliminary "as-is" picture
From the SOPs and process documents, sketch a first draft of how each in-scope event is registered today — the main steps, the actors, and the forms used. This is a starting hypothesis, not the truth: you will test and correct it in the field. Capturing it now means you arrive with specific things to verify rather than a blank page.
3. Fieldwork planning
Turn your understanding and your open questions into a concrete plan: who to see, when, and what to ask.
3.1 Map your stakeholders
You cannot plan fieldwork without knowing who to see and why. Build a stakeholder map covering everyone from national policymakers to facility staff and citizens.
For each stakeholder, record: name / role, organisation, level (national, sub-national, facility, citizen), their interest, their influence, what you need from them, engagement priority (high / medium / low), and contact details. Plotting interest against influence helps you decide who to engage, and how deeply.
3.2 Plan the schedule and logistics
Turn the stakeholder map into a concrete itinerary:
Itinerary — specific dates, sites (central registry, regional offices, health facilities) and people to meet.
Site selection — deliberately include contrasting contexts: urban and rural, high- and low-volume offices, well-connected and offline locations. Note your reasoning so the research is defensible.
Objectives per visit — what each meeting or site visit needs to confirm or uncover, based on the gaps from section 2.
Logistics — travel, permissions, equipment, and (for workshops) venues, invitations and materials.
3.3 Prepare the discussion guides
Write a short, tailored guide for each audience rather than one generic list. Suggested starting points:
Policymakers / CRVS officials — mandate, priorities, known pain points, and what success looks like.
Registrars — the real day-to-day steps, exceptions, workarounds, volumes, and what slows them down.
Health-facility staff — how births and deaths are notified, and what data they hold.
IT / systems staff — current systems, connectivity, integration appetite, and security.
Citizens — how they register an event, what it costs them in time, money and travel, and what gets in the way.
Build in the inclusion lens. In every guide, include prompts about under-served groups: how do rural or hard-to-reach families register? Are there gender-related barriers? How are persons with disabilities, or displaced, stateless or undocumented people served? Are there customary or religious practices the formal system does not capture? These questions are easy to omit and hard to retrofit.
4. Outputs and definition of done
Key outputs: by the end of this stage you should have:
a collection of source materials (laws, forms, certificates, SOPs, fee schedules, boundary lists), with gaps explicitly logged
a legal-parameter register — the completed analysis from section 2.2, flagging what still needs field validation
a preliminary as-is sketch for each in-scope event
a stakeholder map with engagement priorities
a fieldwork plan and schedule with site-selection rationale
a set of tailored discussion guides, one per audience.
Definition of done: you are ready to move to Field Research & Discovery when:
[ ] all priority documents are collected, or their absence is logged as a field question
[ ] the legal-parameter register is drafted, with open questions flagged
[ ] the stakeholder map is agreed
[ ] the fieldwork schedule is confirmed with named contacts
[ ] a discussion guide exists for each audience you plan to meet.
5. Resources and support
For broader guidance on requirements gathering and process mapping for CRVS, see the CRVS Digitisation Guidebook.
For any questions about gathering requirements or configuring OpenCRVS, contact team@opencrvs.org.
Next: the fieldwork plan and baseline understanding produced here are the inputs to Field Research & Discovery, where you validate and correct them on the ground.
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