Ghana Statistical Service should be an authority – Dr Oduro Osae

The Dean of Studies and Research at the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), Dr Eric Oduro Osae has called for a review for the law guiding the activities of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) noting that the Service needs to be elevated to the status of an Authority.

“We are also suffering from legal obsolescence. The law regarding GSS itself requires a comprehensive view and if you permit me, we should move that institution from a service to an authority,” he said.

According to Dr Osae, once government makes GSS an authority, the institution can ‘bite’, demand and ensure that centralized statistical data collection would be made.

He added that, “If you look at international minimum standards, and you look at the conventions that we’ve ratified, and if we indeed want to prioritize data in this country, and want to empower service and decentralize its operations and make it demanding as we are saying, then we need to move it to an authority level”.

Dr Osae said until GSS comes up with a policy, it needs to review the laws that cannot materialize.

He was speaking at the launch of a National Assessment Survey by the National Development Planning Commission and the Ghana Statistical Service.

He shared his disagreement with some findings of the survey noting that the sources obtaining funds into the national statistics service was not written.

He revealed that, commercialization of statistics can be one of the ways of taking revenues to fund the Ghana Statistical service, urging all to review the legislative process supporting GSS and its entire statistical data collection, utilization and management, align it with the centralize arrangement in the country.