Kakata – The Ministry of Education (MoE) through its Education Management Information System (EMIS) with the support of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has launched a training of trainers workshop for central level enumerators ahead of the 2020/2020 nationwide. Annual school censuses 2021 and 2021/2022.
About 50 master trainers are expected to be trained and deployed across Liberia to further provide hands-on training to enumerators who will be recruited at the school district level to collect inclusive and accurate education data from approximately 7,000 community and religious communities. founded schools from all over the country. Training of staff at the district level involves trainers being trained in the use of a mobile digital data collection device and its platform for onward transmission to district level enumerators.
Giving an overview of the five-day exercise on Monday in Kakata, Margibi County, the Deputy Minister of Planning, Research and Development said Liberia’s human development results are among the lowest in the world with insufficient resources to address the situation.
Deputy Secretary Elton W. Kesselly noted that limited resources for education must be invested wisely for optional outcomes.
He hinted that in order to generate the necessary resources to address the many challenges facing the country’s education sector, reliable, accurate, real-time education data is needed to inform educational decision-making, target surgical interventions, and equip education administrators and policymakers to monitoring the provision of educational services and progress.
“Availability of timely and accurate data on education is a long-standing problem. The Ministry of Education is trying to solve the problem of unavailability of timely and accurate data,” he said.
Against this background, Minister Keseli said that these upcoming censuses intend to close the gap due to the lack of timely and accurate data on education and the regular publication of the annual report on education statistics and to ensure the decentralization of the data collected.
Continuing, Minister Kesselly stated: “We intend to conduct the 2020/2021 Annual School Census to this standard; and we intend that these data, especially the 2020/2021 annual school census, will serve as a touchstone for future annual school censuses.”
He added that the upcoming nationwide annual school censuses of 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 will ensure that enumerators use both paper and digital tools to collect data; and verify the accuracy of all information provided by the administrator before entering the information on the tablet or smartphone to ensure the accuracy, completeness and reliability of censuses.
Minister Kesselly said that during these censuses, enumerators should work together with school, district and county staff to ensure that they are exposed to the digitization of data collection processes. He added that the collected data will be analyzed and officially reported by November 2022.
