District Commissioner for Dowa Stallichi Mwambiwa has challenged the District Training Team (DTT) in Dowa, to make sure the oncoming exercise to update the Unified Beneficiary Registry (UBR) provides quality data for effective implementation of programs and interventions in the district.

He was speaking on Tuesday when he opened a 5-day DTT training at Civil Aviation at Lumbadzi, that aims at training the team as trainers of trainers for the upcoming exercise.

Mwambiwa said collection of quality data does not only depend on enumerators, but also the DTT which is integral in building capacity for enumerators and spearheading the data collection process.

The UBR, he said is crucial in identifying participants in important programs like Social Cash Transfer, Public Works and others, hence the need to have quality data to rid of mishaps that occur.

“We sometimes blame enumerators for poor data, but the genesis of quality data collection begins with you. If you properly train and lead the enumerators, the data will be of high quality, but if you fail, then the whole exercise fails and you will be at fault.

“As such you must own this noble exercise because it is not you who will directly benefit from this, but rather the ordinary person in Dowa. With this, I expect your total dedication to the exercise for the whole duration,” said Mwambiwa.

He as such urged the team to make sure data to be uploaded into the system is of highest quality and that there will not be any hesitation in replacing any member who is not performing.

Mwambiwa also called upon the team to make sure enumerators capture data from all villages, communities and households assigned to.

Also, that it was the team’s responsibility to take care of resources to be used in the exercise.

Some of the areas covered during the workshop, which also involved members of District Social Support Committee, include UBR Policy Framework, data collection process, roles and responsibilities.

Speaking during the same, Johnfunny Mwale, Principal Economist responsible for Poverty Reduction and Social Protection Division in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, said they have put in place measures which will ensure there is no room in manipulating data input activities.

“We have a system that will show the time when an interview was conducted, which will be cross checked in relation to number of household members, distance covered from one household to another and other variables. 

“Also, we will have spot checks, and GPS mechanism which will show where and when one was. As such, any kind of ill activity should not even be taken into thought,” he said.