A two-day workshop for data collation and review of job creation achievements of the Delta State Government through its ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) has been held with a call on the participants to ensure that job creation data is valid, verifiable and useable.
The workshop organized by the Office of the Chief Job Creation Officer in Asaba has participants drawn from selected MDAs that have jurisdiction relating to job creation either through direct or indirect jobs between June and September, 2016.
For the period under review, the participants majorly Directors of Planning, Research and Statistics (DPRS) with their Schedule Officers were to submit the Data Job Creation Template of their MDAs to ensure that their inputs are summed up, reported and published.
Addressing the participants, the Chief Job Creation Officer, Prof Eric Eboh, stated that it is a standard practice to conduct data verification for every data collated to ensure that it is valid, verifiable, reliable, useable and applicable.
Prof Eboh said: “This is an innovation of the Okowa-led Government to measure and track job creation by the MDAs in line with international best practices and the framework recommended by the International Labour Organisation.”
He said one of the instruments for job creation is the data template approved and adopted by the State Executive Council to establish a benchmark and systematic framework for measuring and tracking job creation in the MDAs.
He noted that job creation numbers is a very important economic statistics indicator to gauge the pulse of an economy over a given period of time.
He reaffirmed that job creation as a development objective is crucial to the State Governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, as encapsulated in his SMART Agenda, the centre piece of the development agenda of the state.
According to him, this underscores the reasons for the establishment of the Office of the Chief Job Creation Officer which are to design and implement job creation programmes in collaboration with relevant MDAs and to collate, analyse, process, review, report and publish job creation numbers on periodic basis.
He listed the four (4) categories of jobs created in the state to include direct skilled jobs, indirect skilled jobs, direct unskilled jobs and indirect unskilled jobs.
While describing direct jobs as jobs created through the programmes of the State Government, he explained that indirect jobs are jobs created in projects and activities implemented by contractors engaged by the State Government.
He recalled that the State Government in its one year in office created 17,173 direct and indirect jobs which was published in the Delta State Job Creation Score Card thereby providing a single reference statistics for jobs created in the state.
He however called on the DPRSs to collaborate to harmonize statistical figures generated in other matters of Government’s policies and programmes so as to avoid disseminating inconsistent and conflicting statistics to the public.
Responding, some of the participants who spoke thanked the Chief Job Creation Officer, Prof Eboh, for the workshop with the assurance that they would be proactive to ensure that the State Government realizes its job creation goals and that statistical figures are harmonized in the state. The high point of the event was the presentation of data by MDAs.
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