By: Lamin B. Darboe
Communication Officer, MoPS
The Ministry of Public Service (MoPS) last week commenced the first phase of the 21-day civil service and pensioner census within four (4) regions of the country.
The four regions where the census is ongoing are: North Bank Region, Lower River Region, Central River Region and Upper River Region.
Fifty-four (54) data collectors and supervisors are currently deployed in the aforementioned regions comprising of 18 teams and each team consist of three core officers and a driver.
The Ministry of Public Service senior officials addressed verifiers briefly shortly before they depart to their various duty clusters for the actual start of the verification exercise.
Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Public Service (MoPS), Pateh Jah described the exercise as an important exercise, adding that the reason of the exercise was for his ministry to come up with a Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS).
“HRMIS will be used as management tool to manage the human resource of the government. While we are developing the tool, we felt that the pay roll needed to be clean and updated so that the information that would be gathered from the exercise be uploaded in the system,” PS Jah explained.
For his part, the Permanent Secretary for Reforms at MoPs, Sherif Jallow urged civil servants and pensioners to remain in their duty post stressing that verifiers would meet them in their duty posts as they didn’t want the services provided to members of the public be disrupted.
Director of Reforms and Project Manager for the Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS) at (MoPS), Alhagie Jallow said the exercise was part of the ongoing public sector reforms designed to establish an accurate and up-to-date database for civil servants, enhance payroll integrity and support effective planning and budgeting within government.
According to Director Jallow, the verifiers are conducting the exercise in-person using secure digital tools, adding that civil servants and pensioners are required to present themselves before the verifiers within their official duty stations only.
He says the exercise is not meant for witch-hunt, neither for a punitive measure against anyone, but it is a reform-focused initiative which is intended to improve service delivery, transparency, and efficiency within civil service.
He urged all civil servants and pensioners to fully cooperate with verifiers and provide them with accurate information, noting that the success of the exercise depends on collective participation.
Director Jallow assured civil servants and pensioners that all information collected from them during the exercise will be treated with strict confidentiality and used solely for administrative and policy purposes.
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