By Isatou Jawara
The Ministry of Agriculture’s department of planning in collaboration with CILLS, recently organized a nine-day capacity building programme on data Collecting for enumerators on Market price Information Systems on 2G technology.
The training, funded by CILLS project Market Information System 2 Generation, was a follow-up to the regional one organized in Dakar, Senegal.
The nine days training was developed for three groups; agriculture, market information systems, and fisheries and livestock. Held at a local hotel attended by various stakeholders, the closing ceremony was attended by the Deputy Permanent Secretary and the Director of Planning.
While delivering the closing remarks, the Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Musa Humma said that the key role that MIS plays in providing information on the food security systems at national, regional and even international levels, cannot be over-emphasized.
He posited that the SIM must constantly be updated to respond to numerous requests from users, and in this regard,CILLS through the regional P2RS project initiated it in the seven countries covered by the project.
The Director of Planning, Mr. Jerro Manneh, told the participants the training is on the management of web platforms for data management and how to present the interactive voice server to users of SIM data and how to interrogate it.
According to the director, collecting a reliable and timely market price data would do an excellent service for the consumers in getting information on price and availability of food stuff at a convenient time. It also helps producers to plan their production better and make it consumer-driven.
At the policy level, reliable MIS is critical to planning for the good or crises situations as a reliable market price information could serve as an alarm bell for timely policy decision making, said the Director of Planning.
Mr. Oumar Konombo from CILLS, pointed out that the tools learnt from this training are important for the migration from first generation MIS to second generation.
“However, this is the beginning of the process because there are still additional modules to learn during the next training sessions in the future,” he noted.
The CILLS expert promised that at regional levels, experts will continue to develop the other modules; adding the enumerators of this training should continue to pursue data collection between MIS in Gambia and should base their model on a tool that integrates, collects, process data.
