By Mphatso Nkuonera
Minister of Health Khumbize Chiponda Kandodo on Thursday hailed National Statistical Office (NSO) for timely completion of Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
The MICS tracks many child welfare & SDG indicators. Key among findings, the survey found that Malawi has only met 17 percent of the 169 Sustainable Development Goals but the country has made progress in child education, mortality rate, and child health.
Chiponda emphasized that statistics are crucial in policy making, planning and implementation of sustainable development goals which can build Malawi.
Commissioner of Statistics Mercy Kanyuka, said the findings are pivotal towards attaining of the country’s developmental agendas hence it is important that all stakeholders follow up on the report.
UNICEF’s Country Representative Rudolf Schwenk concurred with Kanyuka saying it requires all stakeholders to join hands in order to achieve a very health population as the country now understand a number of issues statistically from the survey report.
“Every intervention we support has to be founded in evidence. It is only when we know that a certain percentage of children has no access to critical services that we can mobilize resources and partnerships to support the government,” said Schwenk
The Malawi Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) was carried out in 2019-20 by the National
Statistical Office as part of the Global MICS Programme. Technical support was provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), with government funding and financial support of UNICEF, the Royal Norwegian Embassy (RNE), German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), Global Alliance for Vaccinescand Immunizations (GAVI) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Global MICS Programme was developed by UNICEF in the 1990s as an international multi-purpose household survey programme to support countries in collecting internationally comparable data on a wide range of indicators on the situation of children and women. MICS surveys measure key indicators that allow countries to generate data for use in policies, programmes, and national development plans, and to monitor progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other internationally agreed upon commitments.
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