The Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources is working hard to establish a Sector Information System (SIS) to improve data collection across the country.
The Deputy Director Policy Planning Budgeting Monitoring and Evaluation officer with the Sanitation and Water Resources Sethina Okornou made the revelation at the ongoing 2023 Mole XXXIV Conference in Jirapa of the Upper West Region on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.
According to Deputy Director Okornoe, the aim of the Sector Information System (SIS) is to collect and analyze critical data related to the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector. “This is to help provide real-time access to accurate data concerning the WASH services to inform policy and to address all government major national and international WASH issues”.
Explaining further the need for SIS, Deputy Director Okornou said, “We don’t have to wait for a census to be conducted before we know the number of people who have access to water or sanitation.
As part of the processes, we have organized training for regional environmental health officers and planning health officers across all 16 regions. And that was to introduce them to the architecture of the Sector Information System (SIS).
In her presentation, she stated that the plan of the Ministry is to train officers at the district level because they are the ones who will be doing the data collection. “We have developed a standard operation procedure; we have also designed a questionnaire for data collection of the SIS. So, the plan is to start the training and data collection in November this year, and by June 2024, we would have been done with the training and after each training, there will be data collection for the training”.
She further revealed that in October 2024, they will have the full role out of the Sector Information System.
“The server will be hosted at the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources; data collection will be at the district and to be validated at the regional level before it comes to the national server.
The Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources is putting SIS in collaboration with the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and we are closely working with the Ministry of Local Government and office of the Head of Local Service.
Asking whether the introduction of SIS will help promote WASH activities, she said, we are in the era of evidence-based decision-making, if you want to make a decision, you need data. The data we are quoting during a presentation is 2021. So, what happens in 2022? But the SIS is going to give us the administrative data at every point at a glance. We can know what is going on even at a specific region.
However, as part of efforts to support the media in the WASH sector, World Vision Ghana and GAMA Sanitation and Water Project supported some selected journalists from the Media Coalition against Open Defecation (M-CODe) to participate in the 2023 Mole XXXIV conference in Jirapa in the Upper West region.
Source: Apexnewsgh.com/Ghana
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