Improving modern civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) was the goal of the Fifth Conference of African Ministers Responsible for Civil Registration, held under the theme of “Innovative Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System: Foundation for Legal Identity Management” to achieve all aspects of social and economic development goals.
The conference, held for five days in Mulungushi International Conference Centre Lusaka, Zambia including the two days of ministerial meetings on October 17 and 18 emphasized countries in the continent to give attention to improve the vital events registration, which is very weak in Africa.
The CRVS system is a foundation for robust and sustainable legal identity systems in the continent. It has been also stated it is crucial for the realization a continental free trade agreement in Africa, which is part of free movement of people of the continent, since it has connection with the national ID system.
Inonge Mutukwa Wina, Vice President of Zambia, said in her opening speech on Thursday October 17 “we share a common vision, to build an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven and managed by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the international arena. If you truly understand civil registration, the reality is that we cannot achieve this great African vision without counting and recording our citizens which is what civil registration really is.”
During a ministerial media briefing at the conference that opened on Monday October 14 attended by experts from member countries and international partners Zambia’s Home Affairs Minister, Stephen Kampyongo, said African countries had made progress in their institutional capacities to deliver a legal identity but added more needed to be done to address the continent’s ‘scandal of invisibility’ where half of the continent’s children are not registered at birth.
At least 1.5 billion people lack proof of legal identity the world over. Half of them are in Africa, exposing them to vulnerabilities, including lack of access to services.
Half of the children in the continent are also not registered according date revealed on the meeting.
The UN Sustainable Development Goal and Africa’s Agenda 2063 have also given attention to the vital event registration that shall contribute to tackling the challenges that the continent faces.
For instance, the 12 of the 17 goals of the SDG has motioned about the registration of the vital events that shall solve problems at 2063 targeted goals has also magnified the issue.
In her video message Vera Songwe, Executive Secretary of UN ECA This is a subject that is of crucial importance to Africa’s economic and social development, and that is at the core of the realization of our ambitions to eradicate poverty, and to achieve inclusive and sustainable development and respect human rights.
“Africa, which is home to 1.3 billion people, is faced with a critical legal identity gap, whereby many exist without being known to their governments and without any means to prove who they are,” she said.
“According to UNICEF, the births of 2 in 3 infants in Africa south of the Sahara remain unregistered, and 3 out of every 4 lack a birth certificate. It is further projected that if the current trends continue, the number of unregistered children aged below 5 in the region will soar to nearly 115 million by 2030. The World Bank complements these estimates reporting that half of the estimated 1.3 billion people that lack proof of legal identity live in Africa,” she added.
On his opening remarks of the experts meeting Oliver Chinganya, Director of the African Centre for Statistics at United Nations Economic Commission for Africa noted that civil registration was the foundation of legal identity – a universal requirement for SDG16.9 to “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration’’. He highlighted the significant progress registered on the implementation of the APAI-CRVS Program
including: (i) the operationalization of the resolutions of the Nouakchott Declaration; (ii) improved staffing levels of the ECA Secretariat and; (iii) the continental strengthened commitment to conducting comprehensive assessment of CRVS systems in Member States.
Speaking at the opening session of senior officials, Victor Harrison, AUC Commissioner for Economic Affairs stressed the importance of Civil Registration data for a functional and people-centered integration process that aims to allowing citizen to benefit from their fundamental right, improve their wee-being, promote job creation, and market expansion through trade, free movement of people and labor mobility.
He encouraged AU Member States to register all births, marriages and other vital events on their territory without discrimination and irrespective of the legal status of the individuals concerned (including refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless persons, as well as those at risk of statelessness, and migrants.
Charles L. Lufumpa, Acting Chief Economist and Vice President of African Development Bank, said that the Bank had been playing a critical role in implementing the APAI-CRVS program, which was a key part of its overall statistical capacity-building program for African countries. Noting the progress made over the past decade for the improvement of CRVS on the continent he highlighted some challenges and commended efforts by all stakeholders to create awareness and knowledge about the importance CRVS and secure national identity systems for socio-economic policy making. He stressed the need for scaling up efforts towards modernizing and digitalizing CRVS systems across Africa.
The main objectives of the conference are to identify key challenges in the implementation of the Africa Program for Accelerated Improvement (APAI) of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics at regional and national levels, reaffirm the commitment of governments and development partners to CRVS and identity management through a holistic approach that strengthens institutional mechanisms for accelerated improvement of civil registration, vital statistics and identity management systems on the continent; and to review and share best practices from African countries on CRVS and identity management system digitization processes, using appropriate information technology infrastructure and improving innovative business processes, to ensure that universal CRVS systems are interoperable with national identity management and various government functions.
The meeting has also given attention to digital identity management systems in AU member states and discusses new and emerging initiatives such as the digital identity initiative in Africa and the United Nations Legal Identity Agenda, both of which rely on a well-functioning and efficient CRVS and identity management systems.
Legal identity is established through the civil registration of a birth, a process in which the government records important biographic information about the occurrence and characteristics of birth and persons experiencing the event. This record is routinely updated with important changes in civil status, such as marriage and divorce, and is retired upon the civil registration of death and by the issuance of a death certificate.
The first ministerial meeting was held in 2010 in Addis Ababa and the fourth meeting was held Nouakchott, Mauritania in 2017.
Africa must work to document its people conference stresses
Media council conducts first general assembly
The Ethiopian Media Council (EMC) held its maiden general assembly after it was registered as a legal entity by the Agency for Civil Society Organizations, to discuss about how the future.
The discussion was held at the Intercontinental Hotel on October 19, 2019, in the presence of Getechew Dinku Director of Ethiopian Broadcasting Authority and representative of United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Established with the aim of contributing to the development of professional and responsible media in Ethiopia, EMC has got registration certificate from the civil societies’ agency three months ago, after three and half years of process, according to Teguest Yilma, Chairperson of Ethiopian Media Council, who made an opening remark at the meeting.
As the number of media outlets increase and the country is set to hold general election next year, having responsible media is vital, according to Getachew Dinku.
He stated that the establishment of self-regulator media council in Ethiopia by media owners will play critical role in allowing the media outlets to provide timely, balanced and accurate information in a responsible manner.
He also urged all media outlets in Ethiopia to be member of Ethiopia’s first self-regulatory media council.
The first establishment conference was hosted by the United Nations on 12th January 2016 at the UN Conference Center.
During the council’s founding meeting, 19 founding members have signed on to the membership, now the members have increased to 29 which include public and private media outlets.
Living Water
TENSAE International Business Enterprises plc, a pioneer in the water sector for over 20 years by improving water treatment technology has launched a new way to treat water so people can enjoy safer drinking water.
TENSAE is a regional distributer of, Hack products a US company established 70 years ago to work on producing water quality and treatment technology covering Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti including Ethiopia. 
“Our company is closely working with Ministry of Water Irrigation and Energy and the Ethiopian Water Utilities Federation and the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). They have evaluated and approved new technological methods developed by Hack Company. All EPA-Approved methods are cited in the Federal Register and compiled in the Code of Federal Regulations,” said Anteneh Kassa, Managing director of TENSAE International Business Enterprises plc.
“As there is a lot of pressure on the water system when there is an increase of population in cities the need to treat waste water and knowing the level of balanced nutrients in the water is essential,” Sudhir Singh, HACK Business Development Manager East Africa said.
Tackling inequality could save millions of children
In Ethiopia, children’s risk of dying before age 5 varies more than three-fold
An unprecedented study mapping child deaths over almost two decades finds that the likelihood of a child reaching age 5 varies more than three-fold among zones in Ethiopia.
The study finds that in Ethiopia, 198,492 children died before their fifth birthdays in 2017, as compared to 430,852 in 2000. The highest mortality rate at the zone level in 2017 was 89.3 in Afar Zone 1. The lowest was 29.3 in Addis Ababa. Neonatal disorders were the biggest cause of deaths before age 5 in both 2000 and 2017, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, but the total number of deaths decreased by more than 30 percent during the study period. Diarrhea and respiratory infections were also major contributors to child deaths.
The study is the first of its kind, mapping child deaths in 99 low- and middle-income countries at the level of individual districts, provinces, and municipalities. Published today in the journal Nature, the findings include precision maps illuminating health disparities within countries and regions often obscured by national-level analyses. An interactive visualization accompanying the research compares child death rates from year to year.
The research, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, looks at countries where more than 90% of child deaths occurred in 2017. Across all countries studied, the likelihood of a child dying before age 5 varied more than 40-fold at the district level.
Researchers estimated that if every district in the low- and middle-income countries studied had met the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of at least as low as 25 child deaths per 1,000 live births, 2.6 million fewer children would have died. If every district within a country rose to the level of the best-performing district in that country, the estimated number of deaths averted rises to 2.7 million.
The vast majority of the 17,554 districts among the 99 nations studied saw improvement in lowering child deaths, but levels of inequality between districts were more variable over the study period. Despite major gains in reducing child deaths over the past 20 years, the highest rates of death in 2017 were still largely concentrated where rates were highest in 2000.
“It is as reprehensible as it is tragic that, on average, nearly 15,000 children under age 5 die every day,” said Dr. Simon I. Hay, the senior author on the study and Director of the Local Burden of Disease (LBD) group at IHME. “Why are some areas doing so well, while others struggle? In order to make progress, we need to enable precise targeting of interventions, such as vaccines. Our findings provide a platform for nations’ health ministers, clinicians, and others to make focused improvements in health systems.”
The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reveals areas of success where strategies could be replicated across and within countries, according to Dr. Hay.
For example, in Rwanda, the highest district-level rate of child deaths in 2017 was less than half that of the lowest district-level death rate in 2000 – gains partially attributed to investments in children’s health in the poorest communities, expansion of health insurance, and increasing numbers of community health workers. Nepal significantly decreased inequalities among its districts over the study period. And Peru made major strides in reducing child mortality and inequality after implementing sustained, cross-cutting antipoverty and health programs.
The study estimates both rates and absolute numbers of deaths by district, presenting a complete picture of global child mortality that illuminates important trends and patterns.
A growing proportion of child deaths are occurring in areas with low overall death rates. Neonatal mortality (death occurring in a child’s first 28 days) and infant mortality (death inthe first year of life) are both increasing as a percentage of total child deaths. These trends highlight the need for tailored approaches.
Hay and his research team are working toward more detailed mapping of factors that influence child survival, including education, malnutrition, and disease prevention, in order to better understand the specific obstacles faced in different regions.
