Government statistician at the Ghana Statistical Service, Prof Samuel Kobina Annim, has disclosed that some areas in the Greater Accra Region may have an extended deadline to ensure they are counted.
According to him, this is to ensure that everyone in the country is country. The areas include Ga West and Ga North.
Prof Annim further revealed that per the data coming through yesterday, “95 percent of expected households have all been counted and enumerated”.
“We are seeing fifteen out of the sixteen regions crossing the 91 percent threshold. It’s only Greater Accra that is below 90 percent and we’ve seen tremendous improvement in Greater Accra. You’d recall that on the fourteenth day of the exercise when we did the press release on the completion rate of Greater Accra, it stood at 55 percent that was 12 days out of the 14 days. And it inched up to 80 percent, then further 85 percent on the 15th of this month and currently we’re talking about 85 percent work being done in Greater Accra. So, we are targeting the 15 percent outstanding for the rest of the month.
“Our primary goal is to ensure that everybody is counted. The reason why we gave the two week window had to do with the recall. We didn’t want people to forget what happened on the 27th that is why we gave an initial two weeks period to ensure that everyone is counted. So, right from day one we knew that we were going to do these extensions. I must say that there are some areas specifically in Ga West and Ga North that we may have to give it a couple of weeks beyond the 30th of July with the aim of ensuring that everyone is counted”.
Reasons for extensions of population counting
Touching on the extended deadlines for the counting, Prof Annim explained that diverse reasons have necessitated the “extensions”. Among them, he stated that respondents “were not willing to participate in the exercise”.
“Again we’ve had some of them we’ve been successful in getting to appreciate why they need to participate in the exercise. We still have some of them we’re going to intensify our persuasion… We’ve had some people who openly said that they don’t want to be part of the census taking. Particularly in areas like Ayawaso West, Ledzokuku and Krowor municipality, these are areas we’ve had people coming in openly to say that they don’t want to participate in the exercise.
“The lead reason is that they don’t see the connection between the times that they’re going to invest in the activity in their own wellbeing or the national development that we all seek to have. But again, this is where we need to do a lot more education because people don’t see the resourcefulness of the census data and they see it as a counting exercise”.
Education on population census
To tackle the reluctance simmering among the public, Prof Annim called for education among the populace.
“Once we educate them that we are going to take data on their characteristics. It is the only activity that everyone in the country’s data will be captured by Ghana Statistical Service. So, it gives the government the opportunity to make targeted interventions, we are making headway in that regard. Other reasons we’ve had to put forward for the extension had to do with places where we underestimated the workload because these are fast growing areas. I must say that typical areas are Ga West, Ga North, Kpone Katamanso and to an extent Adenta. During our demarcation exercise we thought Adenta is a well-built area and we didn’t envisage that within six months to one year, we’re going to see a lot of localities coming up.
“Just yesterday my attention was drawn to the need to do some further work in Bole. As we do this work and as people move from one area to the other, we have to count everybody”.
