NGAO to get new role in planning

National Government Administrative Officers (NGAO) are set to play a key role in the country’s national planning, budgeting, and development projects management, among others, through a grassroots data collection programme aimed at strengthening evidence-based decision-making processes.

The data collected will inform resource allocation, policy formulations, programme monitoring, baseline establishment, accountability and auditing, and donor reporting.

The programme, rolled out by the state department for economic planning in collaboration with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and Konza Technopolis, is targeting the assistant county commissioners, chiefs, and assistant chiefs who act as the first contact of information from the grassroots level.

Speaking during the official opening of a three-day training session for the NGAO officers, Garissa County Commissioner John Cheruiyot said that the NGAO team had been collecting data over the years and only needed to be trained on how to transform raw data into actionable information for development.

“We are here to be strengthened, to be built so that we have more skills to deal with data. Indeed, if you go to your village, you know almost everything. We have our village elders who also know all the issues, but now, how to convert this into important data is the skill we are here to gain,” Cheruiyot said.

“We have several government projects within our localities. Your participation is critical and key. When we are looking for data from those key areas, whether they are the urban areas or the rural areas, we should be able to enumerate. You can record all the projects within your area of jurisdiction; therefore, we are here, through the expert, to instill the skills and strengthen you to do that,” he added.

Cheruiyot further reiterated the need for accurate and dependable data, tasking his team to avoid hearsay and report on the true picture on the ground.

“We want you to be attentive to this training so that the data we are going to get from the village, the sub-location, or the location is accurate and dependable. The element of accuracy must come from you. You are the backbone, so you must be dependable in the collection of data,” he said.

Dr. Danielton Mwaka, an economic consultant leading the training, said that there was a need to have a continuous data collection exercise instead of waiting for the decade-long census, which in turn would strengthen daily decision-making processes and improve monitoring of projects.

Mwaka at the same time regretted that correct and accurate data with local context could be misreported, leading to inaccurate planning and resource allocation.

“These sessions are very key because data is the new gold. Many times, planning misses it when correct and accurate data with local context is not well collected. The world has also gone digital, so it is also important to build skills and capacity for NGAO officers on the digital tools for data collection where data can be collected instantaneously, feeding to national dashboards where monitoring of progress of projects running on the ground can be happening,” Mwaka said.

“Putting together a team from NGAO is absolutely important for the sake of unifying the channels of data collection so that we don’t duplicate resources and efforts, and also, what we get can be streamlined in a common funnel for all data. Many times when data is being collected, the NGAOs are engaged but remotely. No, we want to have them sitting at the center of the data collection framework because they have a touch on the ground, which is easy to validate,” he added.

Rashid Shamar from the State Department for Economic Planning, on his part, revealed that moving forward, the government would make decisions based on data, arguing that NGAOs presented an extensive network for data collection; hence, the need to bring them on board.

“We want to engage the NGAO team on utilization of data for the long term planning of the Kenya Vision 2060.

The importance of data is that it provides a basis for decision-making, and we want to utilize the extensive NGAO network for both sending the data that we collect from the ground and also for the people on the ground to validate the data we are collecting just to make sure that the data we have communicates and speaks to each other and we avoid making decisions out of hearsay,” Shamar said.

“The decisions we are going to make as a country going forward will be based on data. If it is an area, we know the population, the water deficiency, and the number of students and teachers, and all these will now inform how the government, for example, is employing teachers, and eventually, it is that resources follow the people,” he added.

By Erick Kyalo