i Agincourt Health and Population Programme, South Africa.

In many countries most deaths occur at home. Such countries often have civil registration systems that are limited or non-existent and therefore most deaths go unrecorded. Countries that cannot record the number of people who die or why they die cannot realize the full potential of their health systems. Health systems need reliable numbers and causes of death to function prop-erly. But in these circumstances – in the absence of a complete picture of the population’s health – there are tools and techniques that can be used to obtain a fairly accurate representation of mortal