A two-day training workshop is underway in Winneba as part of efforts to enhance the knowledge and research expertise of Research Officers of the Information Services Department (ISD) to produce scientifically based and accurate reports for government decision-making.

The training programme is meant to enhance the capacity of the Research Officers to be able to gather information on government policies and programmes on all sectors of the economy.

This comes on the heels of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Ministry of Information (MOI), the parent Ministry under which the ISD falls and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) as part of ongoing measures at retooling the ISD to deliver on its mandates.

Addressing the participants at the opening ceremony on Friday April 29, 2022, Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah entreated the Research Officers to ensure quality and accurate gathering, processing, and provision of data to inform government decision making processes.

“This training programme is meant to enhance your research skills, fine-tune your data collection methodology so that our research outcome is seen or viewed as empirical, accurate and reliable. It is also important to know that the information your forward to the head office as our field officers or enumerators for analysis becomes the foundation on which the analysis is made. It is therefore necessary to provide us with data that is accurate.

“The quality of your work as a Department and Ministry as a whole is largely dependent on you our Regional Metropolitan Municipal and District Research Officers. I therefore urge you all to give serious attention to this path that we are charting to deliver on your mandate and pay more than usual attention to the resource persons as they take you to the various presentations to sharpen your skills as enumerators and field officers,” the Minister added.

He was optimistic that the training of the Research Officers will help the ISD collate quality and accurate data that will in turn help it make meaningful inputs into government decision making processes.