What Will National Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey Determine?
Earlier today, a Data Needs Workshop was held leading up to the seventh round of government’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. It’s called MICS and the last round was conducted in 2015, and should happen every five years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the survey was not conducted. Nonetheless, the various ministries that are a part of the national survey are now looking to new data that will guide their individual priority areas. The workshop was led by Paulette Wade, a monitoring and evaluating specialist at UNICEF. She gave us an outline of the exercise, after the head of the Statistical Institute of Belize explained how they will manage all the data, and then various representatives of participating ministries shared how the data will assist in their work.
Paulette Wade
Paulette Wade, Monitoring & Evaluating Specialist, UNICEF
“There is something like a governance structure, so we have a steering committee that’s made up of the CEOs, and they are going to say okay, yes, these are the things that – final validation as to what we need. There is a planning committee that looks at what are some of the areas that we need to do. like this data needs assessment. This is something that has to be done, so the planning committee plans that data needs assessment to find out from the government what it is that they need because the mix comes with a laundry list of questions. There is 177 questions I think. We can’t go in a household and give a questionnaire that is two to three hours. No woman would answer that kind of questionnaire. So we need to look at what are critical questions that we need to ask, so that at least we can say, okay, maximum an hour we would spend in a household, and then people are more, um, open to doing a questionnaire.”
Diana Castillo-Trejo
Diana Castillo-Trejo, Director General, S.I.B
“The MICS is a survey that’s composed of several modules that cover a wide range of areas: health, disability, child labor, education, and so with all of these modules that are available to us. What we need to do is prioritize. So we are today hearing from our stakeholders, our data users, to get an idea of what their data needs are, so we can, as we are designing what will go into this survey, we can make decisions on what the priority modules and questions will be for the MICS.”
Gabrielle Hulse
Gabrielle Hulse, Economist, Ministry of Economic Development
“I work at the Ministry of Economic Development and we are responsible for implementing and monitoring the Medium Term Development Strategy, which is the government’s plans, policies, and programs for the next five years. So a lot of the work that we do – the implementation of the M.T.D.S – we’ll rely on the implementation of the internal ministries of the line ministries. So whatever modules they find necessary for their ministries to strengthen their capacity and their data sources within their ministries will feed into the successful implementation of the M.T.D.S. overall.”
Emir Castaneda
Emir Castaneda, Health Educator, Ministry of Health, Wellness
“We are looking at the data, at gaps that where we in this workshop we are going to Identify and what are the data that is mostly needed in the Ministry of Health or what are data that is like a gap, noh? So, that is what we are here for and to discuss and so when the survey is ready, then we will use that data for our daily work. So as a health educator, we work mostly in the communities, so we work with community health workers so that information we will provide to them so that we could enforce, so we could strengthen the work that we’re doing in our communities.”
Dylan Williams
Dylan Williams, Director, Policy, Planning Unit, Ministry of Human Development
“This data helps really to inform all of our national development and sector planning. The importance is that the indicators of which 40 of them also helps us to report on the sustainable development goals. And so specific to that is that the richness of the information, if I could use that terminology, is only available in the MICS, understanding that in terms of a limitation as a country, we don’t have a national data collection exercise outside of the census or, for example, the MICS, or more frequently the, um, labor force survey, which is of course limited in itself.”
