The Managing Director (MD) of the National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC), Mr. Nani Juwara has called on the general public to cooperate with Data collectors of the newly built Information Management System (IMS) of the country’s electricity giant, for them to be able to work effectively during the project.
The NAWEC boss, who believes the cooperation of the general public “is key in this project”, made the clarion call last Monday, as the Company commenced the 21 million dalasi Data Collection activities meeting of its IMS, held at the NAWEC boardroom. The project, as per the official version, signals the beginning of activities of data collection jointly handled by NAWEC Gambia Bureau of Statistics (GBoS).
The Gambia Electricity restoration and modernization (GEM), it’s been indicated, is a 164-million dollar project funded by the World Bank (WD), out of which 6.5 million dollars had been allocated for the NAWEC turn around service of activities-including this D21 million data collection for the period of 6 months.
This data collection activities is all geared towards better services delivery for NAWEC, and NAWEC, in partnership with GBoS, will also raise awareness of their customers on what the data is all about.
Juwara had assured his audience at the meeting that, as the Managing Director, he’s fully committed to making the IMS implementation a success. While emphasising “this is a project of great significance and value” to them, he pointed out that, this particular exercise is at the nucleus of the success of “Boka IMS project”, in making sure that they have dependable data, not just for their internal operations, but to also better serve their customers.
The NAWEC head said, to him, success in this exercise would mean “improved accuracy of billing, improved quality of supply and quicker fault response time and identification of obsolete and damaged equipment such as meters, transformers, poles for upgrade and replacement”.
Referencing the adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” [GIGO: the quality of output is determined by the quality of the input], Juwara charged that they could only achieve the benefits he had highlighted, “if we can rely on the data we receive from this exercise”.
He used the opportunity to thank GBoS for the cooperation NAWEC is receiving from them in this partnership, using their broad experience in data collection. Saying though, they (NAWEC) have their own unique ways of identification or naming conventions around their assets, the MD stated “we will try to harmonize as much as possible demographic information using GBoS as base data”. He also said that this project is under component three of the Gambia Electricity Restoration and Modernization Project (GERMP).
Mr. Matarr Manjang, Coordinator, in his remarks appealed to the general public to grant the data collectors access to information so as to improve in their customers services.
Other speakers were Mr. Chris Timble of World Bank, GBoS Secretary General, and Edrisa B. Jarju.
