About NMIS

The Nigerian Government has committed $1.2 billion USD to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In an effort to regulate and most effectively use this funding, the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on the Millennium Development Goals (OSSAP-MDGs) created the Conditional Grants Scheme (CGS). Through this scheme, matching grants are given to Local Government Areas (LGAs) to be used for funding approved projects and programmes geared to reducing poverty and improving education and health.

In order to support the CGS, and as part of their goal to promote the use of data in the local planning process, OSSAP-MDGs undertook a rigorous, geo-referenced, baseline facility inventory across Nigeria in 2010 (113 LGAs) and 2012 (661 LGAs), with an additional survey to increase coverage in 2014. The aim of this survey effort was to collect data for all of the nation’s health, education and water facilities. This data will ensure informed decision making and implementation in local, state and federal interventions aimed at achieving the MDGs.

The end result is this online portal, the Nigeria MDG Information System (NMIS).

NMIS has proven to be an invaluable planning tool for States and Local Government Areas. In 2014, OSSAP decided to take this initiative further and open the data to the general public. The hope is to encourage and help other organizations better plan future infrastructure and move Nigeria closer to achieving the MDGs. It is designed to be used by planners, researchers and the broader global development community.

However, the world is not static. This website needs continued contributions from stakeholders to maintain a high level of accuracy and thoroughness. This website therefore asks for the global community to participate in keeping this key national asset up-to-date with the latest health, education and water facility information.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – such as halving extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by 2015 – form a blueprint utilized globally by governments and leading development institutions. They have led to unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest. (Source: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/)

The information on NMIS is intended to be used to better plan future infrastructure investments and obtain federal funding to accomplish the MDGs, particularly the health, education and poverty MDGs.

More information about these tools can be found on the Planning Tools page of this website.

Gathering data for NMIS was an iterative process, involving multiple surveys and rounds of data collection. Trained enumerators collected data using Android-based smartphones to improve accuracy of geo-referencing and expedite data entry. Before each survey round, experts at both OSSAP-MDGs and The Earth Institute collaboratively developed each survey tool and ensured that lessons learned during the surveying period were used to improve the methodology for subsequent surveys. Data cleaning and analysis followed data collection, prior to the data being integrated into the NMIS platform.

Data analysis and surveying efforts were focused on improving data use in planning in Nigeria. Our teams endeavored to create bridges between the data and planners, through the creation of tools targeted to specific indicators relevant to the Millennium Development Goals. Toward this end, NMIS highlights specific indicators for each facility listed, which can be used to inform decisions about how to bridge gaps to achieve goals on a number of levels, local to federal.

In addition, a gap analysis was conducted for each LGA to further represent targets and shortfalls. These “Gap Sheets” are used to inform recommendations for specific interventions toward achieving the MDGs. They are adaptable and updatable, and are available on the NMIS website on the Download Data page.

The Baseline Facility Inventory Mop-up Survey, completed in the first half of 2014, will be employed to cover the facilities not surveyed during the baseline data gathering effort in 2012 (both missed facilities as well as those built since then). This is the most streamlined survey to date produced by the EI-OSSAP partnership. In it, we have reduced the number of questions significantly, refined questions with difficult or unfamiliar wording and removed redundancies. We focused on data points and indicators that are most often used by technical assistants during proposal writing for the CGS-LGA track – data that has the most impact on planning.

You can access the Baseline Facility Inventory Mop-up Survey questions through the Download Data page of this website, along with an enumeration instruction manual. It represents the most critical data and the most effective way to gather it.

The Explore Facilities section of this website represents a combination of all data collected through the OSSAP-Earth Institute partnership, as well as information from the external data sources listed below.

OSSAP-MDGs data collection efforts were augmented by the following external data sources in order to form the indicators in NMIS:

• Harmonized Nigeria Living Standards Survey (Survey Period 2008-2009), Production Date 2012
• DHS – Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (2008 and 2013)
• Nigerian School Census Survey (2005)
• HSS – National HIV Sero Prevalence Sentinel Survey (2010)
• Population Census (2006)

NMIS provides a snapshot of LGAs’ status on key education and health indicators, as framed by the 2015 MDGs and targets. The education and health indicators presented are not inclusive of all categories that could be represented and, thus, do not fully highlight all needs and all gaps in the basic education and public health sector in Nigeria. Water and sanitation structures were not surveyed separately and were included only if located within education and health facilities.

Education and health indicators in NMIS, as well as tools and technical materials available in the About Page, do not dictate the focus of policy, planning and implementation; rather, they help to identify gaps in order to inform and improve efforts in healthcare and education. Data from a wide variety of sources, including but not limited to NMIS, is necessary to create contextual understanding of the issues.

Education and health indicators were structured with a measure of difference among four different OSSAP-MDGs’ facility-based surveys, which were implemented across a period of five years. OSSAP-MDGs’ facility-based surveys did not capture every education and health facility in Nigeria; for example, many private health facilities were not included in NMIS. While the aim was to be comprehensive throughout all 774 LGAs, full coverage of all health and education facilities in the country was not achieved, and some facilities are not reflected in the data. Data collection was undertaken by enumerators who were trained but not managed by The Earth Institute. Some data points may be outdated or may have been recorded inaccurately.

NMIS is a dynamic database, and future updates to the data will help to improve its accuracy. Please see the Planning Tools page for information on indicators, definitions and surveys.

The Planning Tools section of this website contains the following documents:

1. Gap Sheets for health and education, designed to identify differences between available LGA data and the national standards in each sector.
2. Health & Education Policy Packages, containing recommendations for interventions to target progress toward specific goals in health and education.
3. Indicator Definitions for health, water and education, which contain definitions for terms found in the data sets and surveys on the NMIS website.

In addition, this website can be used as a planning tool at the local, state, or national level.

To submit updates to the data found on the NMIS website, send an email to nmis_updates@mdgs.gov.ng. If you are advising of a new facility not currently on the site, use the subject line “[NMIS] New Facility Request.” In the case that facility information needs to be updated, use the subject line “[NMIS] Facility ABCDE Update Request” – ABCDE represents the five-letter ID of the facility, which can be found in the Basic Information tab of the specific LGA under the Explore Facilities section of the website.

The OSSAP-MDGs office will respond to emails in the order they are received.

The primary purpose of this site is to provide improved information for policymakers and development planners, and as such it was designed to reflect the needs of those audiences. The data reflected in the site, alongside other data collected but not presented, can be found in raw form by linking here. The process of data-gathering was managed by the MDGs office, with the technical support of The Earth Institute. The government employed nearly 1,000 enumerators over the course of three years to gather the data, conducting dozens of training sessions, and added back-checking verification in the 2014 survey which addressed coverage gaps. As with any effort to gather such a broad swath of data, it is not expected to be fully accurate, both because Nigeria’s health and education facilities are dynamic and de-centralized, with a particular focus on improvement during this last year of the MDGs push; and also because the large number of enumerators means there is some inevitable inconsistency in technique and rigor. For policy-making purposes, this is an acceptable margin of error and can be verified as required; but for research purposes it is something writers must take into account.

Given the extensive data-gathering process, however, there may be information researchers and other experts will find useful for related purposes.

With this in mind, please find copies of the three major survey instruments used to gather the data used in this site. The surveys were designed by The Earth Institute’s data team, based on questions designed to create MDG-related indicators used in the Millennium Villages site. The first pilot surveys were conducted in five sites across one LGA in each of Nigeria’s major geopolitical zones. Based on this information, this survey instrument was used to complete the first phase of 113 Local Governments targeted by the Nigerian Government in 2011.

Based on the positive response of the first 113 LGAs in the program, the Nigerian Government decided to complete the remaining 661 LGAs in 2012. In preparation for this major increase in scale, The Earth Institute revised the survey document to reduce the number of questions, based both on the accuracy of responses and the actual use of the question in the original 113 LGAs. That survey document is found here. These first two phases captured approximately two-thirds of the known facilities.

The third survey instrument was employed nationwide to capture the remaining health and education facilities, and is expected to be used in annual revisions. It is notably shorter, and designed primarily to ensure the broadest possible coverage of facilities, rather than to capture extensive detail about each one.

For more detailed information about the scientific process behind the site, send inquiries to the Earth Institute at Columbia University jjamal@ei.columbia.edu, which will make every attempt to answer your questions.

Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on the Millennium Development Goals (OSSAP-MDGs)

Created in 2005, the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on the Millennium Development Goals (OSSAP-MDGs) acts as the Secretariat to the Presidential Committee on the Assessment and Monitoring of the MDGs. In this role, it provides guidance, coordination and oversight on the expenditure of the debt-relief gains (DRGs) while working alongside partners and other actors.

The senior special assistant to the president is supported by a director and desk officers, who liaise with partner agencies. The bulk of the DRGs are invested through relevant ministries, departments and agencies to scale up existing initiatives that contribute to the achievement of the MDGs. The desk officers are in charge of supervision and monitoring of DRG investments in those agencies.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University

The Earth Institute, located at Columbia University in New York City, comprises more than 30 research centers and some 850 scientists, postdoctoral fellows, staff and students worldwide. Working across many disciplines, we study and create solutions for problems in public health, poverty, energy, ecosystems, climate, natural hazards and urbanization. Earth Institute experts work hand-in-hand with academia, corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and individuals. They advise national governments and the United Nations on issues related to sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals. They are educating the next generation of leaders in basic sciences and sustainable development.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University was engaged by OSSAP-MDGs to provide leading international expertise on the design and implementation of the Conditional Grants Scheme to Local Governments, as well as to provide the technical support for the creation of the Nigeria MDG Information System (NMIS).