Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
The Federal government worries over huge costs it incurs in out-sourcing professionals to perform certain tasks in the civil service are coming to an end.
Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mrs. Winifred Oyo-Ita, revealed this Friday at a training progamme on Survey Design, Data Interpretation and Reporting for civil servants.
According to her, civil servants should ordinarily be able to gather and interpret data to help fast-track government policies.
She debunked the tale that civil servants only see training opportunities as welfare packages, noting that the aim of the five-day training is to equip the civil servants with innovative ways of gathering and interpreting data for government.
“There is no system in place to gather data that has historical value and present-day value. We want to build a crop of civil servants that will not be looked down upon.”
Oyo-Ita also told the participants that they had been selected to drive the technological reforms in the civil service to help government make decisions based on available data.
Facilitator of the workshop, Dr. Lola Adedokun, noted that the civil servants had learnt enough to enable them contribute to the development of the civil service.
“It’s all about capacity building, enabling the civil servant to do what they are hired to do and I have been very impressed. They’ve learnt a lot, I believe with all certainty that they will be able to contribute immensely to the development of the federal civil service. I see them being able to collect data, analyse and interpret on their own,” she added.
The five-day training which ended on Friday in Abuja, is an off-shoot of the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (FCSSIP), launched by the Federal government in 2017.