Gambia Bureau of Statistics (GBOS) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Monday launched The Gambia Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 6 findings at The Gambia Tourism and Hospitality Institute at Kanifing institutional layout.
MICS is a household survey that UNICEF developed to assist countries in filling data gaps for monitoring the situation of families, especially children and women.
It is a key source of data on child protection, early childhood education, child health and nutrition for Gambian decision or policy makers.
It was a major source of data on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) indicators and will continue to be a major data source for the 2030 sustainable development agenda to measure Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicator that can be used to track some of the indicators on Gambia’s National Development Plan (NDP).
Women, children and social welfare minister, Fatou Kinteh said UNICEF has been providing assistance to countries at more frequent intervals since 2009 and since then, MICS is conducted every three years instead of five, as it was initially planned, which provides the opportunity for countries to capture rapid changes in key indicators.
‘‘Government of The Gambia is ready to collaborate with UNICEF to surely fulfill their role. The current contraceptive prevalence rate in The Gambia is 17 percent, which indicates an improvement compared to the DHS figure of 9 percent in 2013,” she said.
Baboucarr Sarr, chairman of the National Statistics Council said they will continue to play their advisory role to the national statistic survey, to ensure that the right policies are created for the NSS and The Gambia Bureau of statistics to produce and disseminate reliable, timely and relevant statistics.
Sandra Lattouf, UNICEF representative said Gambia’s current political and socio-economic transformation is fitting, with the adoption of a new national development plan which lead efforts to generate accurate and timely data to measure progress on SDGs.
The MICS has evolved to respond to changing data needs, expanding from 28 indicators in the first round to 200 indicators in the current sixth round and covering child health and nutrition.
