Ghana Statistical Service to begin Quarterly Labor Market surveys to help address labour and unemployment issues in the country. Speaking to JoyBusiness in Accra, Government Statistician Prof. Samuel Annim said the new labour survey will be done in collaboration with the Ministry for Employment and Labour Relations. He said, “We have started discussions with the Minister for Employment and Labour Relations, we are institutionalizing this meeting in such a way that the framework for developing the quarterly labour market survey would be jointly owned by the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations and the Ghana Statistical Service.” Prof. Anim said, “So moving into the phase between 2020 and 2024, what we seek to do is to roll out a quarterly labour market survey which will put us in a position to capture labour issues, labour statistics on a more regular basis.” He said, “The beauty about this is that we are not going to use a cross-section of respondents at any point in time, we are going to follow a cohort of individuals so that we will be in a position of not only generating employment and unemployment figures but to capture labour mobility and that is one of the contentions in terms of whether when we set up industries it’s people who are simply moving around jobs or we are creating jobs where people that hitherto were not in employment are now in employment.” “Now we are working with an unemployment figure that dates back to 2017 and that’s when we did our last Living Standards Survey and we are in 2020,” he said. Currently, the country relies on the Ghana Living Standards Survey and the Census which is gathered every five years to determine unemployment figures, a method the government statistician describes as inefficient for tracking the labour mobility. Unemployment rate In August 2019, the Employment and Labour Relations Minister, Ignatius Baffour-Awuah said information on labour-statistics and data remains the weakest and huge challenge of his Ministry. According to the Minister, the nation's unemployment situation stands at 11.5 per cent in 2015, but has fallen between 3.6 per cent and 7.1 per cent. Mr Baffour-Awuah said, however, skills of most of the 20,000 graduates churned out every year by the seven public universities in the country were always not needed to gain jobs in the formal sector.