By Mohammed Zunurene
The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), has charged the media and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in Ghana to use their influence to put pressure on politicians to use statistical data in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of policies and programmes to reduce poverty in all its forms at the local level.
The call was made at a two-day zonal training workshop organised by the GSS in collaboration with the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), in Koforidua on the Multidimensional Poverty Reports for all 261 MMDAs and StasBank for 24 selected journalists and CSOs drawn from the Eastern, Volta, and Oti Regions.
As part of the training, participants were taken through comprehensive and engaging sessions on the overview of multidimensional poverty, national and district MPI results, findings and perspectives on the use of district MPI results, hands-on session with the StatsBank, and the use of the StatsBank and MPI as tools for advocacy and accountability.
Speaking at the workshop, the Director of Business, Industries and Trade at the GSS, Dr. Owusu Kagya, said a lot of policy documents do not use data from the GSS, hence the need to train the media to encourage the use of official statistics in decision making.
Expressing his content with the conduct of the programme, Mr. Kagya applauded all participants for their valuable inputs during the sessions and gave the assurance that all inputs would be looked into. He encouraged participants to work closely with the statistical service and call on them should they require any assistance.
The Eastern Regional Statistician, Worlanyo Neku, advised media practitioners and CSOs not to sit on the lessons acquired from the workshop but to use them in their work to demand accountability and data driven actions from politicians.
The training was organised simultaneously in four zones across the country to encourage continuous engagement with policymakers and the general public.
This follows the launch of the report and a dissemination workshop in the regional capitals for all MMDAs. StatsBank is an online platform that allows users to access disaggregated statistics from census, surveys and administrative data sources.
