Sure. I'll try to be brief.
There's an encouraging global movement afoot on this, with various regional bodies. Let me just speak to a meeting that was held in Addis Ababa last week with the African Union. There's an all-Africa push for civil registration and vital statistics.
We're speaking about birth registration, because that's the most relevant part of that systemic approach to child protection. That involves advocating—it could potentially be a role for Canada—with other governments to prioritize birth registration. Financial support is definitely an option. Of late we have had masses of funding coming in through the EU on this. At a country level, child protection actors are leading this together with the health sector and the faith-based community and so on, but the advocacy position is that there needs to be a central civil registration and vital statistics body that is of a high standard. There are about six or seven criteria, including the protection of data, etc.
I would like to share with the committee a guide book we prepared in December for everybody, for the field, to really understand the ABCs of getting birth registration in place. We've seen globally that when countries are boosting their civil registration and vital statistics, they tend to focus first on birth registration. So the role for Canada would be as an advocate in whatever fora.... We know that in Toronto, in a couple of weeks, there will actually be a panel on civil registration and vital statistics as part of the MNCH summit.
Let me stop at that.