Government Statistician, Prof Samuel Kobina Annim has said that the 2021 Population and Housing Census will adopt a defacto approach in counting.

Prof Annim, explaining what the approach means said, it is one that looks out for persons who will spend the counting night in the country.

According to him, this particular approach will be deployed because it allows for effective comparison and standardisation of data in terms of “what is done in the past to what is happening in other jurisdiction.”

He added that the aforementioned approach avoids double counting during the exercise.

“Even if you are a usual member in another locality, the key question is where did you spend the census night,” he said on JoyNews' PM Express Business Edition.

“In addition to that our questionnaire (used in the counting) allows us to look at it from other perspectives in terms of usual members of household who are absent for the 27^th night so be it somebody has travelled outside, be it internal migration or external migration, we get information on that provided the external migration is within the 12 month period.”

Mr Anning told George Wiafe that new technologies have been put in place to ensure every Ghanaian citizen is captured in the counting exercise, adding that for this reason listing structures is always done ahead of the day of the census.

“Given that this is our first digitalization census, what drives it is the use of tablets in the data collection. It gives us an opportunity to really identify people based on the date that we automatically capture as a result of the exercise. So once we finish the data collection, we are able to know when the data tripled in because of the tablets we are using.”