The Danquah Institute (DI) on Tuesday expressed disappointment about the 2010 Population and Housing Census Results released by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) last week.
The Institute in a statement signed by Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, Head of Research and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, accused the GSS “for taking Ghanaians for a ride with the census data presentation.
“To our dismay, no census report was presented to Ghanaians by the GSS. What was on show was a Power Point presentation of just a few headline data, similar to what GSS presented in the provisional figures over a year ago”.
According to the Institute, the GSS simply and incompetently presented to the public a few major headline data which was more or less ready by February 2011.
“What we expected to be launched on 31st May, 2012, as promised, was the full report of the September 2010 exercise. Instead, what we had was a partial report, with very scanty information for any serious planning or analysis,” it stated.
It said ordinarily, a census report should reveal at least, religion, ethnicity and language backgrounds; “how many non-Ghanaians are living in Ghana, age distribution by gender or population pyramid, and a basic graph which shows the structure of the population”.
It should also display labour force information that is employment, unemployment status and income levels, dependency ratio by region, distribution of working age population by region and gender and literacy rate.
According to the Institute’s statement, “the lack of basic information on the above in the partial, piecemeal report on offer could only mean that the GSS was either not ready or not willing to release the 2010 census results”.
The DI stated that beyond the regional and district breakdown of gender and an oral presentation by the Government Statistician of the percentage of Ghanaians purportedly above the age of 18, what was presented as a report was anything but a national population and housing census report.
According to DI, so far, there is no proper documented report of the census available to the general public, the academia, businesses, NGOs or institutions of state, adding that “the GSS must do well to give the nation a roll-out plan for the rest of the data”.
The Danquah Institute therefore called on the GSS to come out to explain “this strange situation” to Ghanaians, saying, “this is just not good enough from such an important national institution for such an important national assignment”.**
Source: GhanaWeb
