The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has announced its commencement of the Annual Household and Income Expenditure Survey (AHIES 2022) for some selected households across the country.
A press statement issued by the GSS in Accra, indicated that the survey was successfully launched, following a 2-day virtual and 17-days face-to-face training of 280 Field Officers.
The AHIES 2022 is expected to help obtain data to estimate quarterly and annually, household’s final consumption expenditure to support the compilation of quarterly and annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), using the expenditure approach.
The funding for the survey is a World Bank loan to the Government of Ghana.
The statement noted that the data obtained from the AHIES exercise will help with the following: rebasing of the GDP, the generation of data to support monitoring of targets under 12 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and continuous provision of indicators on the welfare of persons in Ghana.
Some of the key macroeconomic indicators to be generated from the AHIES also included: quarterly GDP, regional GDP, quarterly unemployment, graduate unemployment, underemployment, inequality, growth elasticity of poverty, consumption expenditure, poverty and multidimensional poverty.
The AHIES survey will also provide important data on labour and welfare mobility to better understand some of the dynamics in the labour market and how households move in and out of poverty.
Field Workers Must be Professional
Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, the Government Statistician, stressed that professional solidarity is a collective effort and is required by all field workers to collect data flawlessly to generate relevant and accurate statistics for decision-making.
The statistician thus, appealed to all the Field Officers to strictly observe all the COVID-19 protocols. He reminded them that GSS was able to conduct the census at the height of the pandemic due to the adherence to the safety protocols. So, he noted that adherence to the protocols must be a priority.
Prof. Annim cautioned officers that “data quality would be the basis of a quarterly renewal of contracts for the AHIES and recruitment for other surveys and censuses to be conducted by the Statistical Services in the next few years.”
Mr Francis Bright Mensah, the AHIES Coordinator and Head of National Accounts Statistics at GSS, reminded the Field Officers on the importance of the AHIES exercise. He emphasized that it would be the sources of data for GDP computation.
Mr Mensah iterated the importance of collecting quality data and the mechanisms put in place for quality assurances like the constitution of Data Quality Monitoring Teams and a dashboard for real-time data quality monitoring. He stated that the survey would produce reports at the end of each quarter, as such, “it is necessary that the data collected would be of high quality to facilitate the timely release of results.”
Mr Paul Andres Corral Rodas, representative of the World Bank, touched on the benefits of generation regional data to understand the contribution of regions to national GDP and inequality. He noted that the release of quarterly labour force indicators and the panel components which provide insight on vulnerability and movements in and out of poverty is an important indicator to measure the progress of the country.
The Ghana Statistical Service is therefore, appealing to all selected households to accept, provide the needed assistance and volunteer the required information to the Field Officers for national development outcomes.
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