GSS still uncertain when final census results will be released

Nearly a year after the Ghana Statistical Service [GSS] embarked on the population and housing census, the organization is still not certain when it will release the final results from the enumeration exercise.

Although the Chronicle Newspaper on the front page of its Monday October 3 2011 edition had a banner headline which stated that the final results from the 2010 population and housing Census will be out in November, the Public Relations Officer for the National Census Secretariat, Michael Adu Gyamfi says the secretariat cannot give a firm date for the release of the final results.

The GSS in February this year came out with a provisional result from its 2010 census which pegged the country’s population at twenty four million, two hundred and twenty three thousand, four hundred and thirty one, representing a 28.1percent growth over the 2000 census figure.

Speaking on Multi TV’s current affairs show pm: EXPRESS, Mr. Gyamfi said the Secretariat is still processing data from the exercise.

He explained that this phase includes a post enumeration survey where some officials have been sent to selected districts to ensure that figures brought in by enumerators are genuine figures. “So it is true that it has been long, but we want to come out with a genuine population size, so we don’t want to rush and do something wrong” he told pm: EXPRESS host, Nii Arday Clegg.

Explaining further what has accounted for the delay in releasing the final results, Mr. Gyamfi said the process is very cumbersome. According to him, there are other phases to complete after the post enumeration survey phase and all these phase are designed to aid in churning out indisputable figures.

“There is an edit of the completed questionnaire, coding of every activity, scanning and then final verification before the results can be published” he said.

Another challenge impeding the GSS’s work he noted was the issue of district boundaries, which generated some controversy during the conduct of the census as some people refused to be counted in certain districts citing problems with undefined boundary demarcations.

Mr. Gyamfi also reiterated the fact that it will be impossible to announce final results until all issues pertaining to district boundaries have been resolved.

Joining the program via phone, the Executive Director of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe whose outfit had raised concerns over the exercise, reiterated the think tank’s concerns about the exercise.

He said the GSS failed to identify hard to reach spots using a comprehensive risk analysis framework especially in this technological era “and that could have been done with technology. I mean there are a lot of mapping systems these days that can help you to identify hard to reach places. We thought, if some amount of technology had been utilized, we may have saved ourselves some of these near embarrassments.”

Mr. Cudjoe also raised issues with the apparent lack of an External Monitoring and Evaluation team to check the process saying the situation where the Statistical Service expects the public to call randomly to alert them if they have not been enumerated could leave “a wide margin of error”.

He said even though the population census was to know the exact population of Ghana, it goes beyond a mere head count to “garner sufficient data to prosecute our socio-economic agenda”.

Explaining why IMANI Ghana came up with the “Count Me” campaign, Mr. Cudjoe said the campaign was not necessarily to get everybody who was not counted in Ghana to be counted but rather to serve as a wakeup call to the GSS that indeed people in urban centers had been jumped.

“The Count Me campaign did not get beyond 200 people, but this rebellious way of doing things would have been to show the Statistical Service that these are people who live in easy to reach areas, yet they were not counted, how much more the areas that are very far from the urban centers” he stated.

Michael Adu Gyamfi used the opportunity to appeal to all enumerators working on the post enumeration process to be patient as the GSS tries to sort out their allowances.