The regional capacity building workshop will be held online from 2 to 5 August 2022 as part of a project to strengthen capacity to implement inequality assessments of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems, which has been initiated by ESCAP and includes both in-country and regional level capacity strengthening activities.
The regional capacity building workshop aims to provide guidance for countries to undertake inequality assessments and understand what the findings mean for policy purposes. The workshop will help participants understand why countries should undertake inequality assessments, review data for quality and assess its limitations, analyse results of an assessment, and how to present findings to policy makers so they can be used to improve civil registration of vital events among populations most left behind.
The regional capacity building workshop will be a participatory hands-on workshop to build skills in analyzing data to assess inequalities in registration of births and deaths. Real-world data will be used and analyzed in order to provide greater depth and meaning to the skills gained.
Background
A well-functioning civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system helps ensure that every person has a legal identity, facilitating access to the benefits and protections of the State. It is also the preferred data source for many demographic statistics with numerous indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly related to mortality and fertility while others rely on population data as the denominator. To know who is being left behind, the relevant disaggregated population data needs to be available.
Many countries experience lower civil registration completeness rates among certain marginalized and hard-to-reach population groups or geographic areas. Despite these inequalities and their negative impact, this problem often remains a blind spot. The groups affected remain largely invisible if the matter is not specifically investigated.
To ensure progress in registration is truly universal and fully inclusive, the Ministerial declaration to “Get Every One in The Picture” in Asia and the Pacific recognized the need to address disparities in civil registration completeness and coverage of these groups. Hence, the Regional Action Framework (RAF) on CRVS in Asia and the Pacific calls upon countries to assess any CRVS-related inequalities experienced by population subgroups.
However, few countries have implemented inequality assessments, partly due to lack of clear guidelines and support to undertake such an assessment. Thus, ESCAP developed the inequality assessment project, which seeks to provide technical support and capacity strengthening to relevant national stakeholders to facilitate the implementation of CRVS inequality assessments using secondary data sources. The project is meant to build capacity for demographic analysis to undertake inequality assessments in the future as well as dialogue with policy-makers to ensure the results are used for policy formulation.