Ghana: Making the case for SRS

This blog summarizes a webinar that took place in October 2025 for recipients of grants to support the development of sample registration systems (SRS) in African countries.  Williams Kwarah, a consultant for Vital Strategies, presented a business case that he developed along with Philip Setel of Vital Strategies and Bill Weiss of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Originally developed to apply for funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the presentation illustrates how to communicate about the potential benefits of SRS.

Watch the webinar:

Benefits of a sample registration system

For Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries, SRS could:

•       Provide a fit-for-purpose and cost-effective means of filling a crucial gap in public health intelligence.

•       Offer the necessary combination of government ownership and leadership, sub-national representativeness, timeliness, and data on causes and circumstances of death.

•       Benefit government entities at national, regional, and district levels, as well as development partners.

•       Compare favorably with other data sources in terms of cost.

Key points for developing a business case

Some key points to address in a business case of this type are: 1) the challenges around existing information systems related to health, 2) the goals and values to address, and 3) the proposed scope, scale and implementation. It is also feasible to draw from the experiences of other African countries to estimate costs and compare them to other data systems.

It is also important to discuss what success will look like. For Ghana, the identified pillars of success were:

-          Enabling data-driven decision making,

-          Contributing to health security,

-          Strengthening the country’s civil and vital registration system (CRVS)

-          Providing timely information to development partners,

-          Calculating population denominators,

-          Tracking health-related Sustainable Development Goals, and

-          Saving money by simplifying household surveys.

To download the slide deck from this presentation, click “Get the Tools” in the upper righthand corner of this page.