MICS 2014: Minor improvements seen in nutrition, child health

Ghaus Pasha says improvement recorded across 56 of 125 indicators

LAHORE:

The Planning and Development Board and the provincial government on Tuesday released the final report of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2014. The report showed slight improvements in child mortality, nutrition, child and reproductive health and water and sanitation situation in the province.

The survey—based on the district-level and primarily focussing on women’s and children’s social development—was formulated with the technical assistance of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The survey covered 125 socioeconomic indicators across all districts of the Punjab. Over 41,000 families were questioned in this regard.

Speaking on the occasion, Provincial Finance Minister Ayesha Ghaus Pasha revealed that an improvement had been witnessed across 56 indicators while another 36 remained unchanged or slightly declined. She said a district baseline was extracted from 25 new indicators to monitor future performance. “It will also provide a baseline for sustainable development goals (SDGs) to monitor reporting indicators province-wide,” Pasha said.

She said the Punjab Growth Strategy was pivotal for development. Pasha said the provincial government had to act swiftly and was in need of citizens’ cooperation.  She said the government would collaborate with the Unicef to conduct the MICS 2017. Pasha said the survey would be conducted using six methodology at the tehsil level with a greater number of indicators.

The finance minister said the premise of the survey was to gather statistically sound and internationally comparable data pivotal for the formulation of evidence based policies and initiatives. She said this was also essential to monitor progress on provincial, national and international goals.

Planning and Development Board Chairman Muhammad Jahanzeb Khan said the provincial government had been striving to realise Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the education, health, water supply, sanitation and poverty alleviation sectors.“It will require not only the provision of adequate resources but also an extremely robust system to ascertain area specific needs, efficient use of resources and regular monitoring of results and impacts” he said.

UNICEF Pakistan Representative Angela Kearney said the survey was an imperative tool in determining public budgetary outlays especially in the social sector. In addition to various academic papers being based on MICS data, Kearney said, several MPhil and PhD scholars had used the statistics to complete their degrees.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 16^th, 2016.