National Information System for Social Assistance (NISSA) Data Collection Project in Lesotho

In the perspective of building a reliable social protection system in Lesotho, The Kingdom of Lesotho has decided to institutionalise a National Information System for Social Assistance (NISSA) in order to establish a comprehensive and integrated Social Protection System and to improve coordination between existing social protection interventions.

SiQ (Pty) Ltd was appointed by The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in December 2016 to assist The Ministry of Social Development (MOSD) with the National Information System for Social Assistance (NISSA) Data Collection of 55 895 households in 10 Community Councils. This project was completed at the end of May 2017. A following project was awarded to SiQ (Pty) Ltd in August 2018 for another 12 Community Councils which consisted of 63 035 households that were interviewed and was completed in November 2017.

In 2017 it was decided to start a separate company in Lesotho (SiQ Lesotho) due to the amount of work being performed in that country and the number of people from Lesotho being employed. This is in line with the SiQ vision to always attempt to give back to the community where we are operating in.

Currently SiQ Lesotho (Pty) Ltd is conducting a survey in the remaining 42 Community Councils of Lesotho composing of 6 Community Councils where information will be collected for the first time and 36 Community Councils where an update of information will be done where it was already collected in previous phases. The estimated number of households that will be interviewed in these Community Councils is 200,000 and the completion date of the project April 2019.

The different processes that are being executed in the project are as follows:

• Conducting Community Mobilisation and Sensitisation in all villages where data collection will be taking place.
• Conducting household interviews with all households in the Councils using a mobile application installed on a Tablet.
• Conducting Community Based Categorisation (CBC) of all households in the Councils in line with the Community Based Categorisation (CBC) Manual and the Wellbeing Chart. Every household in a village is being categorised into one of four Poverty categories namely; Mohloki-hloki (Ultra Poor), Mohloki (Poor), Ea Mahareng (Moderate), Ea Khonang (Those who are Able). This stage involves facilitation of participatory poverty categorisation and inputting the results into a pre-designed CBC format on a Tablet.
• Synchronising all collected data to the NISSA MIS after thorough quality assurance.