Yaoundé, November 6, 2015 (APAI-CRVS Regional Support Group) - Experts and administrators from twenty Francophone countries have just finalized five days of proceedings on the improvement of civil registration and vital statistics with a promise to commit their respective governments to rapidly implement the Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (APAI-CRVS).
Organized by the Regional Support Group for the APAI-CRVS, which includes the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF), the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the workshop served as a platform for discussions to encourage Francophone countries to catch up on the delay in this programme by comparison with other countries on the continent.
Addressing the experts and their guests during the opening ceremony of the workshop, the deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization of Cameroon, Mr. Jules Doret Ndongo, considered that the APAI-CRVS programme "constitutes a unique opportunity, as it enrolls all the countries of the African continent which have agreed to move forward at the same pace".
Before committing the experts to take the opportunity offered by the proceedings of the workshop to strengthen and enhance their knowledge, the Cameroon Minister noted that the "APAI-CRVS programme would help countries to resolve the problems of the civil registration system, notably: insufficient qualified personnel and inappropriate premises, documentary fraud, the irregular supply of registers for recording civil status as well as the poor conservation and archiving of registers and a certain indifference on the part of the people regarding civil registration".
The proceedings, characterized by discussions of the experiences of different countries, enabled the experts to agree on, among other things, the need to modernize systems of civil status registration and vital statistics in their respective countries through the strengthening of the coordination of all the national actors involved, the computerization of the registration procedures and the issuing of certificates and the harmonization at the regional level of new systems. With this perspective, the participants greatly appreciated the advances of Mauritania in this area. They also fully appropriated the principles and recommendations of the United Nations in terms of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS), the new tools and guides for conducting assessments of CRVS systems and the development of plans for improvement. Finally, the participants were broadly informed of better global practices in terms of CRVS management, with the presentation of the case of Slovenia.
It should be remembered that this workshop forms part of the framework for the capacity strengthening of actors as recommended by the Third Conference of Ministers in charge of Civil Registration which was held in Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire, in February 2015, under the theme, "promote the use of civil registration and vital statistics in support of good governance in Africa".
