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ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 10-- The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on Saturday urged African countries and pan African institutions to exert concerted efforts towards building a modern civil registration and vital statistics system. The ECA made the call as African experts and policymakers on Saturday gathered at the ECA headquarters in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa to commemorate the second Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Day. The ECA, noting that more than half of Africa's children are not registered at birth, stressed that building modern national civil registration and vital statistics platforms "will make overall development system to function efficiently by leveraging public administration, good governance, and service delivery." "CRVS systems, when fully developed, also contribute to the evidence-based targets of the African Union Agenda 2063, towards the Africa We Want," said Oliver Chinganya, Director of the ECA's Africa Centre for Statistics. The ECA director also noted that national and regional CRVS systems improvement programs "exemplifies the kind of collaboration that makes programming effective and achieve the desired outcome." The continental CRVS Day, which was declared by African leaders in December 2017 in Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, is commemorated across the continent for the second time on Saturday. According to the ECA, the annual commemorative day came at a critical time as an estimated more than 500 million people across Africa do not have identity cards, of which about 120 million are children who do not have birth certificates. | 
