The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development have commenced a five day train of national MDAs and similar institutions in selected three states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on data generation and analysis.
Speaking on Monday during the opening ceremony of the five-day training in Abuja, the FAO Nigeria country representative, Mr Fred Kafeero said the initiative is part of the core mandate of helping to strengthen the statistical systems of member countries.
Kafeero who was represented by the Mr Alphonsus Onwuemeka, said the step down training titled: “Strengthening Institutional Capacity for Improved Data and Information Systems for Policy Planning and Tracking the SDGs in Nigeria,” will reinforce the competencies of the National MDAs and similar institutions in the selected three states.
He said the training is coming after two phases of ToT workshop which ensured that competent master trainers emerged for cascading such trainings to other stakeholders from time to time.
“It is my believe that participants nominated for this are those directly involved in data and statistics functions and who are ICT compliant to cope with the technical aspects of the training. They will be exposed to the use of Open Data Sources Kit (IDK) technology as well as cost free R-package and python software for data generation and analysis.
“Data and statistics play major roles in providing clear, objective and numerical evidence on level of achievement of the programmes and flow of data and information is constantly evolving in the global information society,” he said.
The focal person from Ministry of Agriculture, Mr Olorunmola Dare who represented the director, Planning and Policy Coordination Department, Mr Zubairu Abdullah, Federal Ministry of Agriculture, said the intervention which commenced in 2019 was necessitated by the need to revive and enhance Nigeria’s capacity for agricultural data generation for evidence-based policy formulation and project implementation.
“It is worthy of note that the Train-the-Trainer (ToT) and Phase two of the exercise were carried out successfully as a follow up to the needs assessments on ICT and Statistical Infrastructure earlier conducted. It is my belief that at the end this Stepdown Training exercise your ability to source for credible data, process and analyze into information for evidence-based decision would have improved.
“Overall, our goal is to acquire human and material resources for the provision of reliable, consistent and timely statistical data in a user-friendly form to ensure an effective planning, management and monitoring for the development of the agricultural sector of the economy,” he said.
