Introduction

The African Centre for Statistics in collaboration with Statistics Division of ESCAP has jointly organized two back-to-back events on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) at the UN Conference Centre in ECA from 30 May and 3 June 2016. The first event being held from 30 May to 1 June is a meeting of civil registration and vital statistics experts that will review and validate a trainers’ manual on production of vital statistics based on civil registration records. The meeting will also validate a template on vital statistics report developed by Statistics Norway in collaboration of ECA and ESCAP. The expert group meeting will be followed by a two-day inter-regional seminar on exchange and discuss best practices in CRVS in Africa and Asia and Pacific.

The meetings are being attended by 21 CRVS experts from 11 countries in Africa and 4 countries from Asia, namely Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritius, Bhutan, Turkey, Philippines and Korea. The UN agencies and other international organizations that are attending the meeting are UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA, Centre for Disease Control, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Statistics Norway. A few independent experts are also participating in the meeting.

Objective

 The specific objectives of the expert group meeting is to:

• Facilitate a detailed review of the Template for developing of Vital Statistics Report
• Facilitate a detailed review of the draft trainers manual
• Collate inputs and feedback from experts on the content and structure of the manual
• Recommend improvements to be incorporated to finalize the materials
• Develop a strategy for testing the manual and subsequent application by countries for capacity building

The objective of the inter-regional seminar will be to identify common challenges in implementation of CRVS programmes in both regions and various strategies adopted by countries in their successful mitigation. The following areas will be covered:

• Improving accessibility of civil registration services, including accessibility to remote, hard-to-reach and nomadic populations
• Creating demand for registration of all vital events
• Coordination among national stakeholders and development partner
• Digitization of CRVS systems
• Ensuring sustainability and political commitment to improvement of CRVS systems
• Building capacity of national CR and VS officials
• Monitoring of performance of the systems and registration completeness
• Building demand for vital statistics from CR

Expected outcome

Countries’ inputs collected in the meeting will feed into various public good documents produced in the regions.

The other important aspect of the five days meetings is that the collaboration on CRVS work is no longer limited within one continent but is now extending beyond Africa to other continents. This is a new collaborative way of working which should be tried out more often not only between two regions but even at global level. This will help ‘achieve more with less’.

ECA/ACS is a major partner and driver of the CRVS and therefore the expectations of Member States from the Commission to ensure its success are high especially in light of the implementation of agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development.