Surender Prasad Pandey

Surender has been working in the sector of demography and official statistics for last two decades with special interest in the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system and mortality. He has worked in different departments under the Government of Nepal, including the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the Department of Civil Registration. He has also worked as a chief of the local Statistics Office for seven years and leaded different statistical operations within the jurisdiction, including the national population census and different  household surveys. Before, joining the civil service, Surender spent five years as a mathematics and science teacher. He has also worked under the Poor Identification Board established in 2011 for poor household identification and targeting purpose in Nepal.

Surender has completed Master of Science degree in Mathematics  from the Tribhuvan University, Nepal  and the Master of Regional Development (Demography) from the University of Queensland, Australia under the Australia Awards Scholarship. He is pursuing his PhD under the Commonwealth Government funded Endeavour Leadership Program.

Assurance of the affordable and quality health service  is one of the  fundamental human rights and one of today’s development agendas. To achieve these, the national health policy requires reliable evidence base, including quality, timely and disaggregated mortality data. Despite this, many low- and middle-income countries, like Nepal are forced to rely on incomplete and poor-quality mortality statistics and model based national estimates. In this context, developing and promoting the national Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems as a source of timely and reliable mortality data is one of the best options.

Surender’s research focus is to  understand the  CRVS situation and assess the death registration completeness in Nepal. Another objective is to estimate the major subnational mortality indicators using death registration data from the CRVS system. Surender’s research aims are quite relevant to  the purpose and goals of the Nossal Institute: Improving public health globally and strengthening the health systems by adopting the collaborative approach.

PhD Supervisors

Dr Timothy Adair and Dr Hafizur Chowdhury