of strong working relations and mechanisms of coordination between national statistics offices, civil registration offices and health institutions. Innovations and new technology. Current and emerging information and communications technology, social media for creating awareness and mobile devices (with or without access to the Internet) for capturing and transmitting registered information, among others, can be considered to be an enabling environment for civil registration offices to improve coverage and timeliness of services. Data revolution for Africa’s transformation. At the twenty-third Assembly of the African Union, held in Malabo in June 2014, the African Heads of State requested ECA, the African Union Commission, AfDB and the United Nations Development Programme to organize a high-level conference to discuss the data revolution in Africa and its implications for Agenda 2063 and the 2030 Agenda. The conference culminated in an Africa Data Consensus, with recommendations made, among others, on the centrality of civil registration and vital statistics in the data revolution for Africa’s transformation. The eighth Joint Annual Meetings of the African Union Specialized Technical Committee on Finance, Monetary Affairs, Economic Planning and Integration and the Economic Commission for Africa Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, held in Addis Ababa on 30 and 31 March 2015, endorsed the Consensus. It was noted in the ministerial statement that: High-quality statistical information and data are essential for the proper planning and measurement of development outcomes. Africa should generate its own data to enable it to better monitor and track economic and social targets, including the goals and objectives of Agenda 2063. A data revolution in Africa would afford our continent the opportunity to interact with diverse data communities and to embrace a wide range of data sources, tools and innovative technologies, which would enable the continent to produce disaggregated data, including gender-disaggregated data, for decision-making, service delivery and citizen engagement. This would require building an African data revolution on the principles of openness across the data value chain and a vibrant data ecosystem driven by national priorities and inclusive national statistical systems (Economic Commission for Africa, African Development Bank and United Nations Development Programme, 2015, p. 6). First United Nations World Data Forum and Cape Town global action plan for sustainable development data. Following one of the main recommendations contained in the 2014 report entitled: “A world that counts”,9 the Statistical Commission agreed that a United Nations World Data Forum on sustainable development data would be the suitable platform for intensifying cooperation with various professional groups, such as information technology and geospatial information managers data scientists and users and civil society stakeholders. The first United Nations World Data Forum was held in Cape Town from 15 to 18 January 2017, bringing together data producers and users from the public and private sectors, policymakers and representatives of academia, and civil society. The need to improve civil registration and vital statistics systems featured prominently in the discussions on the 9 Report prepared and presented in November 2014, at the request of the Secretary-General, by the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. Available at www.undatarevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/A-World-That-Counts.pdf. 10