MICS 2025: A promise for evidence-based results for children in Sierra Leone

Kambia, 11 February 2026 – Sailing across the Great Scarcies River in Kambia District and dressed in their bright orange lifejackets, Alfred James leads a team of six young men and women who go from one community to the other to collect key data and assess the living conditions of women and children.

Equipped with GPS, tablets, weighing scales, height boards and water testing instruments for almost three months, Alfred and his team have crisscrossed rivers and trekked on bush paths and shrubs in Kambia and Port Loko Districts to reach households and communities so that they can receive critical data and information from them as part of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2025.

“We are going to Mamankie and Rokumbana villages!” Alfred said with excitement as they put on their life jackets and boarded a small canoe to cross the river. “Every day, we set out on an adventurous journey to meet and engage households and communities in order to obtain critical information from them on issues affecting their lives ranging from health, education, adolescent development to community behaviours and practices such as handwashing, breastfeeding and parenting.”

Alfred is one of more than 150 enumerators or data collectors who have been trained and deployed to several communities across the country to collect data for the MICS. This is a periodic (usually every five years) international household survey developed by UNICEF to collect key data and assess the conditions of women and children. The survey also monitors progress towards global goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals and national targets for the government and its partners. It collects disaggregated data to support evidence-based policymaking aimed at social inclusion of the most vulnerable.

The exercise is being implemented by Statistics Sierra Leone with the generous financial support from the Government of Iceland, and technical and financial support from UNICEF and UN Women.

“Obtaining information from respondents is not an easy feat at all,” Alfred continued, “Sometimes, we have to visit a household or community up to three times in order to meet anybody at home and to engage them.”

The persistent approach of the team paid off as most households responded to their questionnaires. 

“It is also difficult to get women and girls to open up about certain practices such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as they consider these issues to be traditional and sacred and therefore uncomfortable to speak on them,” added Isatu Sallu, one of the data collectors in Alfred’s team. “Nonetheless, with the rich training we have had, we always try to persuade them to speak frankly with us in complete privacy and only women interviewers are allowed to interview women about these sensitive issues.”

The information and data that Alfred’s team enters on the tablets are fed daily into a central hub in Statistics Sierra Leone’s headquarters in Freetown to allow a smooth and seamless process of data collection and ensure accuracy.

“Like the last MICS in 2017, this survey is important for determining progress in multi-dimensional poverty reduction and other key social indicators in Sierra Leone,” said Mona Korsgard, Chief of Social Policy at UNICEF Sierra Leone. “It is therefore crucial that the data and information obtained are accurate so that it can guide policy decisions on issues affecting especially women and children in the country.”

In much the same way as the other teams across the country, Alfred and his team are now wrapping up their exercise in the field and looking forward to a diligent compilation and production of the results which would help the developmental growth of the country.

“We feel satisfied and proud to have contributed to this exercise in far-flung communities for almost 90 days and look forward to reuniting with our families,” Alfred concluded as a wave of contagious smiles beamed across the faces of his agile team.