Anti Malaria Programme: FG to Save N293.7M on Logistics, Data Collection

Onyebuchi Ezigbo

Newly introduced electronic data collection system will save the federal government about N293,700,000 in logistics cost out of the N890 million budgeted for the implementation of the malaria Intervention programme this year.

A group working in partnership with the Federal Ministry Health and National Malaria Intervention programme, Civil Society in Malaria Control, Immunisation and Nutrition (ACOMIN) said the initiative will enable quick identification of malaria endemic areas and for accurate analysis of data on treatment intervention.

The group said the new data collection device known as Accountability Management Information System is an upgraded version of the management information system (MIS) used during the first phase of the malaria intervention project (2019-2020).

Explaining its importance, the Coordinator, Mr. Ayo Ipinmoye said it was designed to collect and analyse data to give more insightful information that can help in decision making, organisation objective tracking and progress report on project implementation by ACOMIN and it’s respective stakeholders.

ACOMIN national coordinator said the new data collection initiative has saved government about N293,700,000 in logistics cost out of the N890 million budgeted for the implementation of the malaria Intervention programme.

In addition, he said that the deployment of technology in data collection will help check Malaria commodities like ACT and insecticide treated net.

He said that with the lastest upgrade of ACOMIS, data can be collected from the field on a real time basis across all the implementing states. These date automatically get stored in the database, processed and analysed in depth and displayed in tables and chats.

According to him ACOMIS has become more interactive and is built to allow the community based organisations (CBOs), State Program Officers (SPOs) , Monitoring Evaluation Officers and National Program Team to interact by submitting data to it.

Speaking on the dangers posed by malaria, the coordinator said that more three billion people, about half of the world’s population are at risk of Malaria disease, a treatable and preventable disease, spread by the female anopheles mosquito.

The coordinator expressed hope that that the current initiative will further help Nigeria in achieving effective malaria control and elimination.