By Mabinty M. Kamara
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Statistics Sierra Leone for the conduct of a Household Food Security and Agricultural Livelihood Assessment in Sierra Leone.
The signing ceremony was hosted at the FAO Sierra Leone Country Office in Freetown on Tuesday, 11th August, in the presence of representatives from both organizations and the media.
Robin Yokie, a Food Security Specialist with the FAO, said that the UN agency had been collaborating with Stats SL and that this time around, the MoU would strengthen this collaboration and operationalize its effectiveness with regards data generation, dissemination and popularization. He added that the MoU will take the relationship between the two institutions to another level.
FAO country representative, Nyabenyi Tito Tipo, noted the proactive steps taking by Stats SL for the relationship with the FAO Rome office in tracking the sustainable development Goals (SDG), and the effort to provide all the data that is required which she said is putting the West African country on the global stage.
She said the MoU was timely, given the ongoing Covid-19 and its impact on countries around the world, vis-à-vis the need for “concrete assessments” of the Socio-Economic impact of the pandemic, especially on Agriculture.
Ms Tipo recalled that FAO had recently been doing a global assessment, as part of which Sierra Leone was placed on the “crisis watch.”
The FAO country boss said beside the assessment of Covid-19 on Agriculture, they intend to “unbundle” it into sub sectors and continue monitoring it, noting they see Statistics Sierra Leone as a key partner in trying to translate the assessment into reality.
Globally, Ms Tipo went on, FAO has been assigned as a custodian UN Agency for 21 indicators of the SDGs, especially SDG 2, which is zero hunger. She said that Statistics Sierra Leone has been very cooperative in providing relevant data which has been used to measure sub regional, regional and global comparability.
Statistician General and CEO of Statistics Sierra Leone, Prof. Osman Sankoh, said that his institution has worked with FAO previously on several national projects, such as the National Early Warning System and Food Security Project; the National Food Security Monitoring Group and the Comparative Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis, amongst others. He said he was hopeful that the MoU with FAO would leverage existing collaboration that was there between the two institutions with the effect of expanding and strengthening their collaboration to broadly disseminate FAO knowledge in the area of food security and agricultural livelihood in Sierra Leone.
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