Statistical Services asked to generate reliable Data

Mrs. Chinnery Hesse, Special Advisor to the President, on Wednesday reiterated the need for the generation and dissemination of timely and reliable data to meet the country's development aspirations.

The country, she said, required a lot of data for policy formulation and implementation as well as for monitoring and evaluation of government intervention programmes such as the Millennium Development Goals, the annual progress report of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy.

Mrs. Hesse was speaking at the launch of two documents - the Ghana Statistics Development Plan (GSDP) and Ghana Statistic Service Corporate Plan- developed by the Ghana Statistical Service's (GSS), on Wednesday in Accra.

The Ghana Statistics Development Plan seeks to introduce coherent and coordinated efforts into statistics production.

The GSS Corporate Plan outlines the programmes and activities for the plan period and also provides the administrative and management base for the plan implementation.

Mrs. Hesse said for the GSS to effectively coordinate the National Statistical System, it must produce and disseminate relevant and demand-driven and evidenced based statistics to meet the needs of both the formal and informal sectors of the economy.

She was happy that the GSS and the Ministries, Departments and Agencies have initiated moves to rectify anomalies in data collection in the country.

Mrs Hesse said government would continue to mobilize resources for the GSS for the implementation of the two documents for a sustained invigoration of the National Statistical System for effective production of relevant statistics for testing the resource and robustness of Ghana's economy.

The Government Statistician, Dr Grace Bediako said analysts needed a range of data from different sources to support the development effort and to design appropriate policies and programmes as well to monitor and evaluate their effects and impacts.

“Much of the data needed to monitor the health and education could be derived from management information systems operated and used by ministries if only these were reflected in the planning of these administrative systems,” she said.

Dr Grace Bediako said for the NSS to positively respond to the needs of users of data, there was the need for quantum leap in provision national statistics and improving on the current performance.