Throughout most of low- and middle-income countries, billions of people are born and die without any registration. Their lives go unrecorded and are unable to influence health and social policies and programming. But this is not true of over 4 million people who live in the 53 populations covered by the health and demographic surveillance systems (HDSSs) that are members of the INDEPTH Network, run by 46 research centres in 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania. Making their lives count for health and social policy has been the aim of the INDEPTH Network since its start in 1998. Now, summary statistics from these HDSSs will be much more widely available through INDEPTHStats, a website developed by the INDEPTH Network for visualising key demographic indicators.