By: James Kamara-Manneh
The National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) together with Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action Sierra Leone (COMSA) on 19th April 2022 held a day meeting to give an overview of COMSA’s Project and how the collaboration with NCRA fits in. The project meeting took place at the Occasion Hotel, Lakkah Village in Freetown.
Revealing the purpose of the meeting, the Director of Births and Deaths Mrs Grace Amah pinned the purpose of the gathering on four key terminal points: to get a good understanding of the project; to get full support of the various Units; to understand how the project fits into the larger COMSA project and to plan the implementation and agree on the reporting format and requirement.
The Director General of NCRA, Mr Mohamed Massaquio said COMSAL is an international organization that partners with them. Like some other agencies, COMSAL supports countries in the management and prevention of deaths and birth registration.
“In Sierra Leone, we have been working with COMSAL for a while in order to see how we can improve on death registration. Quite recently; a project was completed in Bo district and western urban. We want to see how we can use technology and stakeholders’ engagement to improve on registration of births and deaths in Sierra Leone beginning with those two districts”, he said.
He said NCRA staff and COMSAL staff come together for them to be going through the details of the project for people to understand how it works because many times, why project fails, it is because beneficiaries do not understand the details of the project and so they cannot own it up and as the same time you face difficulties when implementing the project from the onset, the conception, the design, planning and implementing the project.
Mr Massaquoi said where you have the backing of the beneficiaries, that project is likely to succeed because they do not only own it up but they would make sure they are part of it and implement it.
NCRA-COMSAL partnership can now work together as well as with other stakeholders involved in communities to be able to account for deaths and births occurring in those communities. Through this partnership, they can now learn from this in order to be able to move into some other districts when the resources are available.
He appealed to all that this project is about the citizens so that when the staff leaves the meeting today and goes into the urban district or Bo district, they should be able to talk to their colleague’s staff and stakeholders in those communities about the COMSAL project by supporting births and deaths registration as a pilot.
The project had been in existence for the last two years but it had been more about studies and research, rather they are moving beyond the studies and research. NCRA DG added that they are now patronizing the project itself to check where there are more occurrences of death, where communities for instance practice how it is reported, how notification is done, how the project is managed and importantly the causes that target because we have limited physicians and medical practitioners.
Giving the overview of the Project, the Assistant National Coordinator of COMSA, Madam Alimatu Vandi presented a slide show of activities that were embarked on in the last two years. The presentation was succinctly tabled detailing facts and data collected in the survey. The meeting climaxed with reporting templates and schedules from various districts of operation.