The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) will soon partner the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology towards data utilisation for sustainable development.

The collaboration which will culminate in the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding will be crucial in the realisation of what is known as micro data dissemination policy.

Speaking at the launch of the statsbank, the government statistician, Professor Samuel Annim was hopeful the move will lead to effective data use to address the country’s challenges.

“If we are being frank with ourselves the only way we can deepen the utilization of data is fostering or fortifying the relationship with industry which is the Ghana Statistical Service and academia.

“There are both immediate and distant factors that are affecting the challenges that we have. As academics, we see that a lot by motivating our research papers with national policy papers and international policy documents in our bid to solve complex problems.

“We’ve made attempts to solve our problems from a very perceptive perspective. This will not take us anywhere. And this is the reason why we keep seeing cyclical events from an economic point of view, social, from a health point of view, the economy is so fragile because of data,” he said.

This forms part of the objectives of Ghana Statistical Services to raise awareness in the university community about the availability of census data in the Statsbank.

The GSS Stats bank is an online platform that gives access to census statistics which contains over 300 million unique statistics from 2021 Population and Housing Census reports.

This will allow users to generate customised tables and maps at the national and sub-national levels at no cost.

This will foster stronger cooperation between the GSS, academic institutions and key strategic institutions in industry.

The University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Coast, University of Health and Allied Sciences and University of Development Studies have been selected to participate in the event.

The Deputy Director School of Graduate Studies, Prof. Michael Poku-Bonsu encouraged participants to share their knowledge.                                                                                                       

“This gathering marks the beginning of Ghana’s data century development journey and I urge all of us here to seize this opportunity to share our insights and expertise thereby ensuring the success of this program,” he said.

KNUST Pro Vice-chancellor, Prof. Ellis Owusu-Dabo also implored the “participants to persistently push the boundaries and frontiers of creativity and innovation.”

As part of the launch, the GSS in partnership with Denmark statistics organized a hackathon for KNUST students.

Team Nerds emerged the winner of the competition.

The team is set to compete with other winners from the participating schools in the national Hackathon.