Statistics Sierra Leone (SSL) and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for effective coordination and collaboration on the conduct of a Household Food Security and Agricultural Livelihood Assessment in Sierra Leone. The event took place at FAO’s Freetown country office on Tuesday 11th August 2020 in the presence of representatives from both organisations and media partners. FAO’s Food Security Specialist Robin Yokie said the MoU will strengthen the collaboration between the two institutions and operationalise the effectiveness of the collaboration that will rely on data generation, dissemination and popularisation, adding it will also take the relationship between the two institutions to another level.
In her statement, FAO Country Representative in Sierra Leone, Nyabenyi Tito Tipo, appreciated SSL’s pro-activeness in its relationship with FAO’s Rome office on keeping track of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for efforts to provide all required data, which she said is putting Sierra Leone on the global stage. With COVID-19 impacting countries worldwide, including Sierra Leone, there is a need for such an MoU aimed at making concrete assessment of the pandemic’s socio-economic impact on agriculture.
Apart from the aforementioned assessment, Tipo said they hope to capture the subsectors and continue monitoring, for which they see SSL as a key partner in translating the assessment into reality. She said the FAO is the global custodian UN agency for 21 SDG indicators, especially SDG 2: zero hunger, advancing that FAO did a recent global assessment based on which Sierra Leone was put on crisis watch.
Tipo said they are very happy with SSL’s cooperation in providing relevant data for measuring sub regional, regional and global comparability. She revealed that FAO recently finished its Country Program Framework that’s aligned with Sierra Leone’s National Development Plan, especially the third objective: enumerating data policy document and research.
Madam Tipo concluded saying the MoU will support the country’s programmed framework which runs from 2020-2023. SSL’s Statistician General and CEO, Professor Osman Sankoh (Mallam O) said his institution worked with FAO on several national projects and hope the MoU would leverage on them, including the National Early Warning System and Food Security Project; the National Food Security Monitoring Group and the Comparative Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis among others.
He said this partnership will expand and strengthen the collaboration to broadly disseminate FAO’s knowledge on food security and agricultural livelihood. Prof. Sankoh concluded by saying the MoU will impact SSL in several ways, among them: enabling both institutions to have joint planning on data collection and analysis; enabling SSL to provide technical and advisory support and; empowering other UN agencies to have broader knowledge on SSL’s activities.
By Sulaiman Karim Sesay