Health programme managers everywhere are concerned with the impact of their interventions on mortality. Where mortality is high, however, reliable statistics on the number and characteristics of those dying are scarce. Demographers have developed a set of so-called‘indirect techniques’for the adjustment of faulty registration data and for the conversion of the results of special questions in censuses and surveys into conventional life table measures of mortality. Some of these techniques are not applicable to the circumstances in which health programmes are being expanded because of the large sample sizes required and because the methods themselves are poor at picking up early mortality changes. By using data obtained in health centres or the answers to a small set of additional questions in small surveys on the survival of recently born children, more useful measures of childhood mortality can be obtained. Some suggestions based on recent experience in several countries are described. Relating any measured mortality change to programme effects will still require more elaborate work probably including some attempt to collect cause of death data on a routine ba
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