By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Irish Aid has donated ICT equipments to the Agriculture ministry. The equipments which are computers and printers are meant to support the district secretariats of the Early Warning System (EWS) program.
Irish Aid is an international aid agency and a lot of their work focuses on nutrition. They expect the district secretariats to gather more specific data for chiefdoms, towns and even villages.
Eimear Murphy, The Irish Aid representative at the ceremony, said: “We believe this will be useful for district planning. In the future more studies could be conducted with specific data that will be gathered.”
The donation was done through the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
Acting FAO Country Representative, David Mwesigwa, during the presentation ceremony remarked that that the equipments would be used to generate local data.
“These equipments will help to generate information through a decentralized form,” he said.
“In the future these data will be used by other organizations to do more concentrated studies across communities in the country,” the Irish Aid representative, Eimear Murphy, told Politico.
Before the donation, data gathering had been centralized at the Agriculture ministry; officials there hope that these equipments will change the way data gathering is done. An SPSS software has been installed in all the computers and staff in the different secretariats across the country had been trained to use them.
The EWS has been a program under the Ministry of Agriculture for the last four years. It was designed to ensure food security for the country. It focuses on monitoring the food stock of the country so that an emergency situation could be averted.
According to the National Coordinator of the program, Mohamed Ajibu Sheriff, the monitoring is done using different tools including climatology.
“We monitor the pattern of pricing in the market. The amount of food produced and even study the climate, which could cause a whole lot of problem if ignored,” Sheriff told the press at the presentation.
The ICT project is said to cost up to $ 45,000 with a lot of the money invested in the training of staff across the country.
There have always been concerns about the maintenance of equipments like these. In response to that the FAO boss said he expected the government to monitor the proper usage of the machines.
“In the end we expect the government to be able to meet the bills and manage the equipments properly,” he said.
If used properly, the computers which are aided with sophisticated software could be a way of meeting specific data needs which in the future could guarantee food security for Sierra Leone.
(C) Politico 24/05/16
