The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and National Populations Commission weekend embarked on the training of 570 adhoc volunteers l in Ebonyi state.
The adhoc staff are to participate in the electronic registration of child births in the local government areas of the state.
Federal Commissioner National Population commission Ebonyi state Dr. Jeremiah Nwankwegu said the benefitiaries after the training would participate in 2024 child birth registration which would be digitalized.
Nwankwwegu disclosed this during the training of adhoc staff from Ezza South, Ezza North,and Onicha LGAs at Onueke, headquarters of Ezza South local government Abakaliki.
He explained that the child birth e- registration would capture children between the ages of 0 -5 , noting that the program was being funded by UNICEF in collaboration with NPC.
Nwankwegu further states that UNICEF has been partnering with the commission especially as they have been the ones printing the free birth certificate of children between 0-17 years.
“UNICEF in collaboration with the NPC is flagging off a program on registration of birth from 0- 5 years. It is a digitalized program where we register our births electronically. This time around we are doing 0-5 years, that does not mean that we are not registering others but in this particular program we are interesting in capturing child’s birth from 0-5 years.
“UNICEF and NPC work hand in hand, they produce our certificate of birth, they have been helping us a lot we give free birth registration from 0-17 years but this one is targeted to 0-5 years.
The Ad-hoc you just saw are the people we are recruiting to do the work. Here is housing 3 local government,Onicha,Ezza North and Ezza South, the other center is housing Abakaliki,Ebonyi and Ikwo LGAs.
By next week we are going to flag off Afikpo zone which is going to house four LGAs. But we are taking our time to train these Ad-hoc staff before going to other zones.
The criteria for choosing these people is that you must be computer compliance because you are dealing with electronic gadgets, the person must be degree holder or a person who is certified to use electronic gadget. Also we choose based on random sampling to make sure that every ward is represented and we choose the number of person to be trained from the strength of the LGAa but in all we will be taking up to 570 participants including those we have not started training.
“The essence of this training is that one, you know the country is planning,if you want to look at the Medicare of these children you have to know the number to know the quantity of drugs assuming it in health sector. Your checking agricultural, economically especially in the world planning, to know the population of the people in a geographic setting and with the 0-5 years data collection now that we have not done the census we can still use it to project and know what the federal government is going to plan intense of drugs and nutrition and so on.
The funding of this program is primarily now UNICEF assisted but NPC is training the staff”.
Some of the trainees expressed reading to do the job.
Ogbonna Bridget said,” I am happy to be participating in this training, I’m ready for this work, I have all the required gadget and I’m following up in the training”.