Accessibility of registration offices for births and deaths: Red Sea Governorate, Egypt

Background: Frontier governorates in Egypt have widely dispersed residential areas, which may make birth/death registration difficult for people because of the distance to registration offices. Aims: This study aimed to assess the accessibility of birth/death registration offices in the Red Sea Governorate, one of Egypt’s frontier governorates. Methods: OpenStreetMap was used to locate residential areas and road networks of the Red Sea Governorate. Buffer analysis, with a radius of 20 km around registration offices, was done to assess the coverage. Network analysis was also conducted to calculate the distance between residential areas and registration offices. All spatial analysis work was done using ArcGIS 10.1 software. Results: On delineating the areas of the Red Sea Governorate, 73 residential areas were identified (eight cities, 12 main villages and 53 residential areas outside of the cities and villages). Buffer analysis showed that even a 20 km buffer was not enough to cover all the residential areas. All cities had a good accessibility to registration offices compared with main villages (e.g. 1.5 km compared with 104.5 km), although two main villages had a good accessibility (0.2 km and 0.4 km) as the registration offices were in the villages. For all 73 residential areas, the median distance was 37.6 km with 60.65 km interquartile range. Conclusions: Residential areas in the Red Sea Governorate have varying levels of accessibility to birth/death registration offices. New registration techniques are suggested to improve accessibility to birth/death registration.