While Ethiopia has successfully reduced under-five childhood mortality, there have been slower gains in reducing neonatal and maternal mortality rates.  About 220,000 children and mothers die every year in Ethiopia.  For most, the causes of death are unknown, with fewer than 30% of Ethiopia's births and deaths being registered. The lack of information makes evidence-based decision-making difficult.  This project will increase the quality of local evidence to help guide Ethiopian priorities by increasing the awareness of causes of maternal, childhood and neonatal deaths. This project will also contribute to global emerging evidence under the Centre of Excellence for strengthening civil registration and vital statistics, which is part of Canada's contribution to the work being undertaken through the Global Financing Facility focusing on the unmet challenges facing many high burden countries to improve maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health.This project aims to generate a national open-source catalogue for cause of death (COD) data from 1990 onward and also pilot 'Global Resource to Accelerate Accurate Death Estimation and Evaluation (GRADE)' platform to decrease the cost, while increasing the quality and feasibility, of COD surveys.  The generated evidence will link causes of death to maternal and child health outcomes, which can be used to inform future policy.The project will provide Ethiopia with its first ever representative data on the causes of neonatal and maternal deaths, which will serve to better identify gaps in health services for mothers and children.  This will enable causes of maternal death to be understood and help Ethiopia in achieving its commitment to reduce preventable deaths by 40% by 2030, as proposed by the new UN Sustainable Development Goals.  As part of national efforts to strengthen civil registration and vital statistics, the goal of this project is to overcome the maternal, newborn, and child health  'Know-Do Gap' in Ethiopia by piloting a low-cost, high-quality COD data collection and monitoring system at the national level.  This will enable scalable solutions to address the critical gaps in maternal and child mortality that can influence local, national and global efforts.This project is part of the Innovating for Maternal and Child Health in Africa (IMCHA) initiative (2014-2020), a CAD 36 million multi-donor partnership funded by Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Canada's International Development Research Centre.