The EGM was held on 28 January 2021, 11:00-14:00h (Bangkok times, GMT+7). The meeting was followed at a later date by the Second Webinar on Using Secondary Sources to Assess Inequality in Civil Registration.

A well-functioning CRVS system helps to ensure that every person has a legal identity, facilitating access to the benefits and protections of the State. Despite national and universal efforts to “get every one in the picture”, disparities in coverage of hard-to-reach and marginalized populations remain. Therefore, the Regional Action Framework on CRVS goes beyond the measurement of civil registration completeness at the national level and includes inequality assessment as part of the essential tools for achieving universal and well-functioning civil registration systems.

To answer countries' request for guidance on how to achieve it, ESCAP organized in collaboration with international and national organizations a series of webinars and Expert Group Meetings (EGM) with the overarching theme, “Inequalities in CRVS: Let’s really get every one in the picture!”.

Following the first webinar, this EGM explored questions such as:

1.    Is the Bali Process Toolkit sufficient as basis for more generalized inequality assessments?
2.    Which groups should be prioritized? Which ones are left out of the Bali Process Toolkit?
3.    What do countries need in order to be able to conduct qualitative inequality assessments?