(Newsletter June 2023)

The third Civil Registration Professionals of South Asia (CR8) meeting was jointly organized by ESCAP and the UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia, and hosted by the Office of the Registrar General, Local Government Division, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, from 6 to 8 June 2023 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The meeting was supported financially by Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative. It brought together more than 100 civil registration professionals from South Asia to discuss priority areas of common concern. Key themes for the meeting were resilience to future shocks and climate change, assessing and addressing inequalities in CRVS, and links between the CRVS system, identity management, and service delivery.

The meeting was convened to review progress against the Asian and Pacific CRVS Decade (2015-2024) and to take stock of efforts to strengthen CRVS systems in South Asia, highlight the successes, good practices and lessons learned, and identify promising and effective initiatives and investments that need to be prioritized and/or resourced to scale-up initiatives in the region. It also provided an opportunity to review the impact of COVID-19 on the Regional Action Framework targets and identify areas for accelerated action.

Resources for the fourth CR8 meeting, including a background paper on CRVS system linkages for service delivery, can be found here.