The National Information System for Social Assistance (NISSA) is an initiative by the Lesotho Department of Health and Social Welfare to create a centralised information system accessible to all authorised social assistance programmes in the country.

Fieldworkers began training on Monday and by 9 April 2011, over 150 will have been trained on how to use Mobile Researcher to conduct house-to-house enumerations on low cost mobile phones.

Working with international social development consulting firm Ayala Consulting, data collected using Mobile Researcher on over 25,000 households will be automatically incorporated into the information system utilising the Mobile Researcher application programming interface (API).

After facing significant logistical challenges using paper to capture 25,000 households initially, the Ministry took the decision to upgrade to mobile technology to streamline data collection and allow the recording of household locations via integrated GPS. The collection of household photographs as well as an image to identify the head of the household provides invaluable information for verification and follow up purposes.

Subsequent phases are planned to enumerate a further 150,000 households making this one of the largest census-type projects utilising low cost mobile phones known.