Census night a beautiful reminder about national exercise - Regional Director

Mr Ernest Nyarko, the Regional Director of the Ghana Statistical Service, has said the census night was a beautiful reminder to the public to participate fully in the national exercise.

The exercise is to help the Service generate quality data to enable the government to have a good overview of the population’s needs assessment and prioritize development.

The census night, which was used as a reference point for the exercise, was characterised by bonfire, sirens, knock-Out, megaphone announcement and durbars in the various communities in the Region to remind people of the start of the process of getting counted for development.

Mr Nyarko said the night was used to generate data on floating population in hotels, hospitals, open spaces and streets, including bus terminals.

"Today, we are starting with institutional enumeration followed by household enumeration," he added.

The Regional Statistician said the listings of structures were faced with challenges such as uncooperative respondents, apathy on the side of some people and absence of people in homes, with some not having any knowledge about the exercise.

Mr Nyarko has, therefore, encouraged all residents to open up for the smooth take of the process to enable the country to have solid data for development projections and actuals.

He appealed to the public to give accurate and credible information to the enumerators to enable them build solid and credible data.

The 14-day national census exercise was preceded by listing of all structures.