Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, Executive Director of the National Population Council
The Executive Director of the National Population Council(NPC), Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah has urged the government to be concerned about the annual growth rate in the country, which she believes could derail the country’s developmental agenda.
The country’s annual growth rate is 2.5percent which increases between 700,000 to 800,000 and is above the global growth rate of 1.5percent, this according to Dr. Appiah is quite alarming.
“The 700,000 to 800,000 is very alarming. We should be concerned about the annual increase because there is an indicator in population called dependency ratio.
The dependency ratio gives you the number of people in the dependency group, like I said, 0-15 over those working and those working are supporting these groups, so if those in the dependent group are big, it means there is stress on the economy, because you will have to make provisions for education, hospital, employment.” she told B&FT in an interview after appearing before the Public Accounts Committee(PAC) of Parliament.
She further explained that a major issue is those who would be employed in the next 15years in Ghana are currently born, “so if we want to look at our employment situation long term, then the time to start is now. So, it is very important that you look at the structure of the population so the dependent group is not too much for those in the reproductive age (those working, economically active).
On the way forward to accelerating growth and ensuring the quality of life, she maintained that; “The way forward is to have a population policy, it should be implemented. The growth rate should be reduced.”
She explained that if there is the talk of quality of life, for instance when you have a baby today; “what do you want the baby to become, why is it that when you are building, you plan, you don’t just start building and hope that God takes care of it.
So, if you have a child, you plan that this child I want him/her to be an engineer, journalist, doctor, then how much would it take for you to get there, that is what we need to do. It is very important that we look at that as a country because otherwise, we would bring jobs to country and not have the human resource to man those jobs, we would end up doing the menial works- drivers, cleaners and all that, not the technical work, but that is what we need, that is what develops the country.” she added.
The duty of government is to reduce growth rate, with a focus geared towards quality.
The current population of Ghana is 28,730,991 as of Friday, August 18, 2017, based on the latest United Nations estimates.
Ghana’s population is equivalent to 0.38% of the total world population, with 54.2 % of the population being urban.
