By Millicent Ifeanyichukwu
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is collaborating with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBC) to enhance the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Nigeria.
Wayne Bacale, Chief of Planning and Monitoring at UNICEF, gave the assurance at the opening of the Seventh Round of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS7) and National Immunisation Coverage Survey (NICS) workshop.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the five-day event, holding from July 22 to July 26 in Ikeja, has representatives of from education, health and agriculture sectors as well as civil societies in attendance.
Bacale said that the workshop was to build capacities and create more awareness on the importance of achieving the SDGs.
According to him, the idea is to keep focus on SDGs and the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Federation Government.
“The aims of this workshop is to enhance stakeholders’ capacity, increase awareness of the methodological design of MICS7/NICS, and gather valuable feedback on the design’s feasibility and utility.
“In Nigeria, MICS has played a pivotal role in gathering essential data across six cycles in the last two decades to shape policies focused on improving the lives of children and women, and this is the seventh one.
“This opportunity will make the stakeholders to be aware of some areas where they are lagging behind like out-of-school children in which both the UNICEF and the government need to invest more efforts either geographically or sectoral,” Bacale added.
The UNICEF official said that the six cycles recorded tremendous progress.
”More still needs to be done. This should be based on evidence and research from household survey for the welfare of the citizenry in Nigeria, ” he said
The Chief Executive Officer and Statistician-General at NBS, Mr Adeyemi Adeniran, commended UNICEF for its financial support and deployment of technical knowledge.
“The new data we are using is from the best methodology and fundamental procedure for quality and reliability.
“This will give us enough sampling that will represent all the states and local government areas – an upgrade from previous exercises.
“Through our partnership with UNICEF Nigeria, we are designing questionnaire for survey to know the number of households to visit and residential areas to cover, including the nooks and crannies of the country, for responses.
“The innovation is different from what we have been doing before which is limited to state and federal levels,” Adeniran said.
Stephanie Kauv, a Monitoring Specialist at UNICEF West and Central Africa, explained that MICS Survey would be used to understand the situation in a typical household.
According to her, MICS can also be used to do analysis on climate.
She said that such an innovation was needed in Nigeria to understand how climate was impacting a typical household.