Mission: The mission statement of the African civil registration and vital statistics decade strategic plan is: To register the occurrence and characteristics of all vital events in Africa to ensure the realization of universal basic human and civil rights, for improved service delivery and informed evidence-based planning and decisions through an efficient and complete civil registration and vital statistics system. The mission statement defines the fundamental purpose of the civil registration and vital statistics system, describing why it should exist and what to do to achieve the vision of the system. It summarizes the core business of the Africa Programme, national, regional and international stakeholders and the public. The purpose of the mission statement is to express the core desire of transforming the prevalent ad hoc and uneven way of organizing civil registration to a holistic and comprehensive systemized organization. It echoes the notion that the key stakeholders agree on what the strategy should achieve. B. Overall strategic goal of the Africa Programme for the period 20172021 The highest goal of the civil registration and vital statistics system is to be able to achieve complete registration and to support the evidence-based development and transformation of society. A reliable system is a basic component of good governance (United Nations System Task Team on the Post-2015 United Nations Development Agenda, 2013). The information collected through the civil registration system allows the identification of a subset of the population requiring specific interventions or services, such as health care, education, social protection and humanitarian response in emergencies. Eventually, the systematically registered vital events can facilitate access to essential public services that every individual is entitled to enjoy. Although the secretariat has achieved some progress since 2010, several activities remain outstanding mainly because of the lack of support given to the Africa Programme secretariat to cope with the activities laid out in the medium-term plan. Other areas of weaknesses also observed in the past years require concentrated efforts to bring all African countries to a minimum desired civil registration and vital statistics operational level. In the light of these issues, the focus areas of the Africa Programme in the coming five years would be the following: (a) To support countries that do not have civil registration law(s) to draft one or those that have outdated ones to have them revised, in line with international standards and common practices; (b) To support countries that have not conducted a comprehensive assessment and developed a costed civil registration and vital statistics improvement strategic plan to conduct an assessment and develop a plan; (c) To guide and support countries with costed strategic plans preparations in order to move to the implementation phase; 14