to the national level. This issue is discussed in more detail later in the report under the substantive issue of birth registration. 68. There is no national formal system within the MSWGCA for the collection of statistics and data regarding child protection, abuse, exploitation, violence, alternative care placements and numbers of vulnerable children. Nor is there an official system for recording the number of child protection cases. The MSWGCA has taken a number of steps to remedy the situation. It has established a dedicated Policy Development and Strategic Planning Directorate responsible for developing a IMS and for the collection and coordination of data. It has appointed Legal Officers and a Policy/Planning Officer who will develop a new centralised IMS. The Directorate aims to generate adequate data to generate the necessary evidence to inform national policy on children’s welfare. Additionally, in order to more adequately respond to its research, planning, legal affairs, data collection, processing and logistical needs, the Ministry’s Human Resources and Administrative/Finance Directorate shall set up various units including, Human Resource Management, Records, Public Relations and Finance/ Procurement units. The Directorate is at present sourcing information from Child Protection Committees which have been established at district and regional levels, but the system is informal, paper-based and incomplete. In addition, the Ministry relies on the Family Support Units’ IMS for child protection data. However, the FSU’s system is limited in that it is manually maintained in a simple register which does not allow for accurate disaggregation and analysis of child-specific information. The Directorate is in the process of building a child protection IMS which is being piloted in two districts (Bo and Makeni). The system aims to draw together, under the coordination of the MSWGCA, data collected by a number of agencies and NGOs active in the districts. The multiple data sets will be centrally collated and analyzed to provide an accurate national child protection picture from national down to district-level. 69. In addition to the sector-specific IMSs, there have been a number of significant developments to improve overarching national data collection and initiatives to monitor progress against national development objectives, especially the provision of services to the most marginalized communities and families in Sierra Leone. The rationale and design of the initiatives will translate into stronger national IMS and M&E systems into which child-specific data, especially data regarding vulnerable children will be intrinsically integrated and will yield broader national pictures of progress towards children’s development which is a founding principle of the latest national development plan. 70. In addition to the administrative data collected at a departmental level, national population survey data is collected by Statistics Sierra Leone, with the support of UNICEF and other partners. The various surveys, including the National Population and Housing Services, the Demographic and Health Surveys, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and others collect child and development-centred data. To strengthen and maintain these, a budget of Le 7,9 billion was allocated to Stats SL in 2014 (Minister of Finance and Economic Development, 2013). 2. General Measures of Implementation  25