A well-functioning and reliable civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system records and certifies vital events such as births, marriages, adoptions, divorces, and deaths. It also establishes the legal identity of individuals, records family relationships, and facilitates access to rights and privileges such as education, health, social protection, inheritance, and voting. This project seeks to provide direct technical support to select African countries by  strengthening the current strategic role and financial capacity of the Africa Program for Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (APAI-CRVS) Secretariat, in addition to carrying out vital management and capacity-strengthening programs. Gender dimensions in CRVS systems will be integrated throughout these activities to strengthen the capacity for gender-responsive CRVS systems in Africa. A new system management approach, the CRVS Improvement Framework, will be introduced to train government experts on how to use business process mapping, improvement, and re-engineering to strengthen their CRVS systems. The Framework manual will be validated by an expert group led by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). A consultant will be placed at UNECA to support select Global Financing Facility (GFF) countries to build and maintain strong CRVS systems. The consultant will also provide support to the validation and piloting of the CRVS Improvement Framework. This will help the Centre of Excellence for CRVS systems meet its mandate and also help with the institutionalization of technical assistance for GFF countries within UNECA. The project will also support a series of workshops for Africa's Registrars-General to strengthen their knowledge and capacity of how to lead process improvement initiatives. These workshops will create valuable platforms for strategic planning, networking, and best practice exchange.This project is part of the Centre of Excellence for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems (CoE-CRVS), housed at IDRC. The CoE-CRVS aims to explore new ways of addressing the poor state of CRVS systems in developing countries through research, development of knowledge products, capacity building, and providing direct technical assistance to selected countries.