Kakata — The Ministry of Education (MoE) through its Education Management Information System (EMIS) with support from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has kickoff the Training of Trainers seminar for central level enumerators ahead of the conduct of the nationwide 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 Annual School Censuses.
The about 50 Master Trainers are expected be trained and deployed across Liberia to onward provide hands-on training for enumerators that will be recruited at the school district level for the purpose of collecting an inclusive and accurate education data from the approximately 7000 public and faith-based schools from across the country. The county-level staff training will entail that trainers are trained in the use of the mobile digital data collection device and its platform for onward transmission to district level enumerators.
Giving the overview of the five-day training exercise on Monday in Kakata, Margibi County, Deputy Minister for Planning, Research and Development said that Liberia's human development outcomes are among the lowest in the world with inadequate resources to address the situation.
Deputy Minister Alton V. Kesselly noted that the allocation of scare resources for education has to be invested wisely for optional results.
He intimated that to get the needed resources to address the many issues faced by the education sector of the country requires reliable, accurate, and real-time education data for the purpose of informing education decision making, surgically target interventions and enabling administrators and policymakers of education to monitor education service delivery and progress.
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"The availability of timely, accurate education data has been a long standing issue. The Ministry of Education is committed to addressing the unavailability of timely accurate data" he said.
Against that backdrop, Minister Kesselly disclosed that these upcoming censuses intend to close the gap on the unavailability of timely accurate education data and regular publication of the yearly Education Statistics Report and ensure that data collected is decentralized.
Continuing, Minister Kesselly stated: "We intend making the 2020/2021 Annual School Census for that standard; and we intend for these data, particularly the 2020/2021 Annual School Census to serve as the touchstone for future Annual School Censuses."
He added that the upcoming nationwide 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 Annual School Censuses will ensure enumerators use both paper-based and digital tools for the data collection; and ascertain the veracity of all the information being provided by administrator before inputting the information into the tablet or smart phone in a bid to ensuring the accuracy, completeness and reliability of the Censuses.
Minister Kesselly revealed that during these censuses the enumerators are expected to work along with the school, district, and county-level staff to make sure that they are exposed to digitize data collection processes. He added that the collected data will be analyzed and formally reported before November 2022.
