GSS to produce more data to guide policy planning, implementation
The Government Statistician, Prof. Samuel Annim, says the service is taking deliberate steps to produce as much data as possible on all sectors of the economy to guide policy planning and implementation.
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“As part of our many initiatives, there is also a deliberate attempt that we've made over the period to demystify the notion that the service only works on key macroeconomic indicators such as inflation and gross domestic product (GDP). Our mandate is not restricted to these two indicators.
It's anything that is social, it's anything that is economic, it's anything that is about the environment, whatever from A to Z, it is our mandate to ensure that we provide data on it to guide policymakers.”
He said in an exclusive interview with the Graphic Business at the Executive Studios of the Graphic Communications Group Ltd in Accra.
The assurance comes at a time when the GSS under Prof Annim is being highly commended for producing valuable data from all facets of the economy, an exercise which has shone the light on many grey areas that have been neglected over time for lack of appropriate data to guide and inform the crafting of specific solutions to address them.
Prof. Annim said “one of the things that I have particularly championed is the fact that if you take our status quo, if we took our policy document which contains all that we need, we want to do their inherent interventions, and it's our duty as a national statistical office, to follow through these interventions and make sure that government is on track, and we distinguish between what we call statistical inputs and statistical outputs.”
He said in the discharge of its mandate as GSS, we think more about what goes into the outputs “and this is what we call the statistical inputs.
So at the time that you are developing policies, that is where we ask ourselves what numbers are they using, and how is that informing what we do? This requires a lot of funds.”
He reiterated that the returns on investment in data systems was enormous, and called for more support to enable the service to do more than it was currently doing because it was necessary to accelerate development in the country.
Development
Prof Annim said development was about data. On the flip side, we always say that you cannot develop without statistics. So, for you to be able to develop you should know where you're starting from.
And for everything that you invest, you need to know what you're getting back. So if you look at the whole process of policymaking, you need to start with a baseline figure, which is about numbers. You can say to yourself that I've invested X amount of money and you are expecting Y returns because it's about numbers.
“So it's not about the production of the data, it’s not about the analysis of the data, it’s not about the publishing of the data, but the entire data value chain, right from conceptualisation in terms of what you want to use the data you want to produce for.
Prof Annim said by producing data, the service was helping to ensure that the data ended up in policy documents, “and more importantly, evaluating the policy target to say that, indeed, we have achieved not only the inputs of the policy intervention, but the outputs, the outcome and more importantly the impact.”
Prof Annim said much as the service had full control over the production side; “We have limited control over the construction of the production of the data. We have limited control over the conceptualisation because we do not make the policies; we don't develop the development trajectories, we have limited control over its use, and we have limited control over the evaluation.
So, when we talk about data, we always need to look at the value chain. And going forward, I'm trying to get people to rethink their use of the word data. Because we use data as a buzzword and in different industries.”