Nasarawa AGILE Trains Stakeholders on Data Collection for Improved Girl-child Enrolment
The Nasarawa State Government, through the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Leadership and Empowerment (AGILE), has trained over 100 Education Management Information System (EMIS) Officers on the imperative of quality data collection for the success of the project.
The training, held on Wednesday in Lafia, brought together representatives from the State Ministry of Education, Area Offices, Universal Basic Education Board, and Education departments from the 13 Local Government Areas and 18 Development Areas.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the two-day capacity-building workshop, Mr. John Mamman, Commissioner for Education, said the training was necessitated because of the critical roles of EMIS Officers in educational advancement.
The commissioner was represented at the occasion by Malam Hassan Mohammed, Director, Planning, Research and Statistics at the ministry.
The commissioner emphasised that the government is optimistic that the training would help the participants get accurate and reliable data on enrollment in soft copy.
Mamman said that the workshop is an opportunity to share knowledge and collaboration among various education stakeholders in the state and to also learn new digital skills.
He added that the government wants to empower the participants with the latest technical know-how on data collection to get reliable data and ensure that the AGILE project succeed.
The commissioner added that education for all was the topmost priority of the Gov. Abdullahi Sule-led administration which was why it has continued to be allocated the highest amount in the budget.
In her remarks, Hajiya Aishatu Aliyu-Isoga, Nasarawa State Project Coordinator of AGILE, emphasized that the training was a deliberate effort to ensure proper planning and implementation of the project.
She noted that AGILE, a Federal Government initiative supported by the World Bank, aims to improve secondary education opportunities among adolescent girls in 18 states, including Nasarawa.
The state coordinator explained that the project, which aimed to ensure that the girl-child goes and completes their secondary education in a conducive environment, would only succeed with quality data, hence the training of EMIS Officers.
She explained that EMIS Officers, who were all computer literate, would be providing the necessary data on girls’ enrolment and level of infrastructure online to the headquarters of the project in Lafia.
Hajiya Aliyu-Isoga added that the resource persons would equip the participants with the requisite knowledge to get current data and provide the same for onward implementation.
On his part, Mohammed Ozegya, a Resource Person at the program, said that the importance of data to the success of planning cannot be overemphasized.
He explained that EMIS officers should ensure that they collect proper data and analyze it to ensure that it is free of errors.
He noted that if the data collected were full of errors, the implementation and outcome would be full of errors as well.
He further said that data helps the government to make informed decisions, allocate resources, monitor and evaluate policy development and review, and accountability and transparency. END