Having a birth certificate is a key to citizenship. Most people born in this country take it for granted that they can prove they are Australian and lawful citizens by producing their birth certificate. But a number of Australians — predominantly Indigenous people and those from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities — miss out on the benefits of citizenship and struggle to fully participate in society because their birth has never been registered, or if it was, they cannot produce a birth certificate to prove it.

The Regional Support Office of the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime has initiated a project to develop a toolkit for interested States to analyse and improve how they register births, deaths and marriages of these key population subgroups. The toolkit will be based on international standards, recommendations and case studies of good practice. It is expected that the toolkit will be published for use in the second half of 2016. This is the concept note for the project.

Civil registration and vital statistics update briefing for the meeting of ministers of health of the Pacific island countries in Honiara July 2014

As part of the reporting structure of the Regional Action Framework on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) in Asia and the Pacific, by the end of 2015, members and associate members are required to submit a baseline report to the ESCAP Secretariat through their designated national focal point. This report is the report submitted by Iran (Islamic Rep. of).

The handbook is a useful reference for practicing statisticians in the national statistics offices, and those working in the education, health, and vital registration agencies in developing countries. The discussions on strengths and weaknesses of different data sources have been carried out skillfully, citing country examples on the use of administrative data for compiling the Millennium Development Goals indicators and other relevant statistics.