By Mabinty M. Kamara
Statistics Sierra Leone on Monday 8th June launched a COVID-19 Impact Monitoring survey and commenced training for 108 enumerators and 18 supervisors for the exercise.
The survey, according to the Director of Communication of Stats SL, Samuel Ansumana, is funded by the World Bank and it’s designed to provide the Government of Sierra Leone and the international community with timely policy-relevant information regarding knowledge of, responses to and the socio-economic impacts of Covid-19 and related restrictions in the country.
The survey, according to Ansumana, will be conducted through mobile phone calls, as opposed to the conventional face - to - face interview, in observance the of the Social Distancing protocol.
With this survey method, the enumerators will call households and ask questions relating to the impact the pandemic has had on their livelihoods and following each completed interview, each household will be compensated in-kind, in the form of mobile airtime.
The households targeted for this survey were randomly sampled from currently active mobile phone numbers from among those that had been interviewed in the 2018 round of the Sierra Leone Integrated Household Survey (SLIHS).
In his keynote address at the opening of the training, Deputy Statistician General, Andrew Bob Johnny, stated that the Covid-19 Impact Monitoring Survey is similar to the Annual Economic Survey of Enterprises (AESE), which was done using survey solutions. He noted that only enumerators that did very well during the AESE were selected to work on this one.
Johnny admonished all participants to uphold the integrity of the institution and their own personal integrity, noting that any slight falsification of the data would be discovered and those found wanting punished.
He explained that all phone calls on the distributed phone lines would be registered and monitored, adding that monitoring of field activities would be done very vigorously. He said enumerators found violating the rules would forfeit their payment and subsequently turned over to the police for criminal prosecution.
The survey is set to commence on Monday June 15, and will last for 19 days.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
