Strategy to improve on statistics in Ghana

Koforidua Aug. 19, GNA - The Statistical Service, in cooperation with Statistics and Research units of 10 selected Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDGs) have prepared a five-year strategy for the development of statistics in Ghana.

Dr Grace Bediako, Government Statistician said the strategic plan was currently under review and that the Service would launch the Plan, which was accompanied by a Corporate Plan of Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), in the next coming weeks.

Dr Bediako was addressing a Dissemination Workshop on Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2006 Report in Koforidua and said the implementation of the Plans was scheduled to begin in January next near. The MICS is a nationality representative multi-purpose household survey developed to gather information on some indicators of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The survey provides up-to-date information for assessing the situation of women and children in Ghana, Ministry of Health (MOH) with baseline information in monitoring women and children health programmes. The MICS also monitors and provides baseline for the United Nation's Children Fund (UNICEF) interventions in Ghana and accurate data for the expansion of the Accelerated Child Survival and Development (ACSD) Programme among others.

Dr Bediako said the strategic plan would ensure that sources of data for official statistics were incrementally tapped into and harnessed, consistent concepts and definitions were used to generate and compile the necessary data and standardized methods and classifications were used for the collection of the data among other things. She said a special attention had however to be given to sub-national level of statistics production. "Presently, with our dependence on sample surveys, there are few policy-relevant indicators at the district level. For example, some basic statistics, such as population size and characteristics are not available.

"Apart from the 2003 Core Welfare Indicators Cluster (CWIQ) survey that was conducted at the district level, all surveys tend to be at the regional level, or for selected districts only," she said. Dr Bediako said while household-based sample surveys were an important component of the work of all national statistical systems, they should be used to complement other sources from administrative registers, if statistics were to serve well the purposes for which they were being generated.

She said the collection of statistics at the district and regional levels were critical to ensure that data were available at the administrative planning levels. She said the role of statistics in the District Planning Units must be clearly and urgently articulated as the nation planned for the 2010 Population and Housing Census.