Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, says the Ghana Statistical Service is working aggressively to increase its statistical products.

This he says is geared towards providing reliable and timely data needed to drive the development of the country.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition, he noted that at the moment the Service is conducting the annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey while preparing to conduct other surveys later in the year and next year.

Concerning the ongoing Household Income and Expenditure Survey, he said, the Service was particularly excited “not just because of its overarching objective which has to do with rebasing our GDP, but the fact that for the first time we’re going to have quarterly labour force statistics.

“For the first time we’re going to have quarterly information on food security, and from our point of view these are some of the critical data sets that we’ve been producing them, but we produce them at an irregular pace, so it doesn’t really help us to understand the impact or the returns that we get from policies related to food security on policies related to employment.”

Prof Annim stated that throughout 2022, the Service will be releasing quarterly data on employment and unemployment, and will repeat same in 2024 while it simultaneously runs the Ghana Standards Living Survey.

“You will recall that in 2013 we did the Integrated Business Establishment Survey which gave us about 634,000 business establishments in the country, we’ve started preparatory work on that exercise and hopefully next year we’re going to do the first phase which is the census of all business establishments that we have in the country,” he added.

He further revealed that “These are not the only exercises that we are doing, we’re going to complement these two with the Demographic and Health Survey, listing of that survey is going to start in the next few weeks; towards the end of the year we’re going to collect data which will give us information primarily on the health indicators of children and women that we have in the country.”

He called on the cooperation of stakeholders to assist the Service collect the necessary data.

“So this is what we’re doing at Ghana Statistical Service and we’re hoping to get the cooperation of all the stakeholders so the Ghana Statistical Service will produce the reliable and timely data needed to drive our development,” he said.