Statistical Service to roll out labour survey

The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has stated that it is going to roll out a large-scale labour survey to help them address labour mobility issues in the country and make its employment statistics robust.

According to Prof Samuel K Annim, Government Statistician, labour statistics form one of the sensitive issues as far as development is concerned in the country.

He said over the years, as a country, Ghana has collected both employment and unemployment data at either lower duration or irregular space.

But he said, “now with the regional project coming on board, one of the things we want to see is a capture of a panel data on a quarterly basis or at worse annual basis which will help us address all the labour mobility issues.”

The Statistician said this in an interview Thursday after opening a two-day workshop being held at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra on the Ghana Statistics Development Project (GSDP), whose opening day (November 12) was used to mark the celebration of African Statistics Day, to raise awareness of the importance of statistics in all aspects of social and economic life.

In his speech to open the workshop, Prof. Annim explained that the celebration of the day provides an opportunity for national statistical services on the African continent to introspect, share experiences for feedback, align their engagements with nationally and internationally prescribed modus operandi and best practices as well as keep track on the take-off path for transforming engagement with statistics for development.

Speaking on this year’s theme ‘Everyone counts: quality statistics for better management of forced displacement in Africa’, the Statistician said as prescribed in Clause 33 of the Statistical Service Act, 2019 (Act1003), the GSS is relentlessly working towards the conduct of its first digital census in 2020.

He further said that census would become the 12th in the series since 1891, as there had been a break-in decennial census on two occasions, during the World War II (1941 – 1958) and the political instability in the 1970s and early 1980s.

He pointed out that one of the challenges the service faced the delay in approving projects, which delay sometime ago lasted for three years costing the nation over $3million.

“So with the regional project which has reached the advanced stage, the GSS has already engaged the Ministry of Finance to explore avenues by which we can get Parliament to approve this project as the World Bank is set to approve it,” he said.

He said the other challenge had to do with better coordination within the national statistical system, stressing that the service did not anticipate that problem affecting the upcoming project.

He said “the simple reason is that now that we have the statistical act which mandates GSS to coordinate activities within the national statistical ecosystem, the act gives us the mandate to set up a national advisory committee of producers and users of statistics and we have the confidence that with this legal provisions and functional relationship, we are going to have better working relationship across all Municipal, Districts and Assembles.”