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We are responding to comments made on the Joy FM channel by the Public
Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) on the 6th of
January 2011 seeking to dismiss our legitimate concerns about the
institution’s conduct of the 2010 National Census.


As far as the GSS’ senior staffer was concerned, nothing untoward had
characterised his agency’s management of the census. If a few people hadn’t
been counted, it was because, and we should all know this, people don’t
spend 24 hours in their homes, and it is more than likely that on occasion
enumerators would call on a particular household only to meet the absence of
the members. Indeed, he reckoned, many of the complaints about the census
owe to the work of saboteurs.


We are unimpressed.


Our goal in raising the concerns we did in the media was not to nitpick on
random events that may or may not have happened during the census. Our goal
was to question the overall credibility of the exercise, which we judged to
have departed lamentably from best practice in census management.


We will elaborate. But first let us explain clearly our seeming obsession
with the census.


A national population and housing census is not limited to enumeration (i.e.
head counting). It goes far beyond that. The United Nations Organisation
(UN) has developed a rather rigorous theory about the principles of
“simultaneity, universality and periodicity” in order to guide this crucial
process of collecting vital socio-economic and demographic data for the
purposes of policymaking. The overriding principle is to better understand
trends in the society in order to ensure that decision-making is responsive
to new realities.

All too often, developing countries hold on to the hallowed realities of
yesteryear, failing miserably to adapt to fast-changing situations on the
ground.


For instance, even as the face of poverty becomes increasingly urban,
so-called “poverty alleviation” programs continue to cling to a rural
construct of poverty, thereby not only misdirecting social interventions but
even more sadly missing out on the opportunities offered by urbanisation in
a services-dominated economy.


The absence of good quality data about our evolving circumstances as a
nation interferes so frequently with strategic planning at the
socio-economic and political level that the least civil society
organisations can do is protest when good money is misspent in poorly
executed attempts to redress the situation.


Think about it: this is a country where the official unemployment rate
hovers around 11%; where economic indicators are routinely dismissed as
unreflective of the quality of general welfare; and where “official” job
creation statistics are left to the vagaries of the political rumour mill.
This is a country, where making an objective statement about improvements or
deteriorations in any particular sector is impossible without descending
into the partisan horrors of name-calling.


Think about it.


In some other places, no one has any delusions about the importance of
censuses. Such is the sensitivity that attends censuses in our neighbouring
country of Nigeria that four censuses have been sidelined or annulled (’62,
’63, ’73 and ’91). We may baulk at such indelicate behaviour on the part of
some members of the Nigerian elite in this matter, but we cannot fail to
notice the general point, which is that censuses are, and should be, grave
affairs. Especially in developing countries.


Census data are a placeholder for us in IMANI for objective policy-related
data generally. The lack of such data accounts for the useless squabbles in
our media. It accounts for the “too much heat and no light” nature of our
political conversations. It locks out independent-minded commentators and
make partisan wrangling the reference point for all debate. It prevents
serious comparisons between different managers of our economy and our
society. It makes it impossible to hold public officers to account for the
management of our affairs, except in the case of the most flagrant acts of
corruption. Every comment on performance risks partisan coloration because
hard-hitting observers are unable to take refuge in objective facts and
figures.


Think about it.


So when we spend $50 million or close to that amount to redress some of
these problems, it is just and fair that we insist on getting value for
money.


When the “if you criticise us, you are out for sabotage” Statistical Service
spends $2 dollars thereabouts to administer a questionnaire to each
Ghanaian, we expect that they shall do that and nothing less.


When the “don’t blame us” GSS sets up more than 23,000 so-called enumeration
centers , and hires 45,000 people to undertake a vital national exercise
over a period of 2 weeks, we expect that they will enhance supervision and
coordination. We don’t expect to hear from people living in some of our most
well-laid out neighbourhoods to complain about having been neglected.


At any rate, the basic arithmetic works out to each census staff
administering 38 census forms a day, far from an insurmountable logistical
burden. As it turned out the period was lengthened and the burden per
enumerator thus significantly reduced. So only a lack of supervision and
coordination could have prevented optimal outcomes.


Which is why our concerns with the GSS relate generally to their not having
sufficiently embraced “best practice”.


By establishing a parallel structure rather than integrating into the local
government system (as was the approach in Kenya in 2009, where $2.5 per head
was spent on an identical exercise with near-spectacular results) and then
falling short of supervision and coordination, which decentralisation would
have augmented, GSS was setting itself up for serious challenges.


By failing to conduct rigorous piloting in order to identify hard-to-reach
spots, and thus to develop comprehensive “risk analysis frameworks” for
these specific geographies, GSS was setting itself up for serious
challenges.


By failing to create the framework for external monitoring and evaluation of
the entire process, GSS was missing the opportunity to improve upon its
internal review systems.


By ignoring the opportunity offered by the census process to create GIS and
other mapping systems to give proper meaning to the household survey element
of the overall exercise, GSS was falling short of excellence.


Kenya, which does not even suffer to the same extent from the kind of
chaotic addressing and identification systems we have here, and operating on
a similar per capita budget, made it a point to incorporate essential
elements of this technological approach into their 1999 exercise.


By ignoring the need to develop a credible “non-response follow-up”
mechanism, as the PRO’s comments appear to suggest (he expects people to
randomly call their offices to alert them), the GSS now risks creating a
census register with a margin of error too wide/loose for comfort.


Non-response follow-up mechanisms were clearly not properly advertised, nor
were the avenues made available to the general public convenient enough.
From what we have gleaned, “re-interview procedures” were underemphasised in
the training of enumerators, many of whom were, in the first place,
alienated by the haphazard approach to their remuneration. The labour
resource strategy was thus strained not only by poor hiring practices but
also by payroll management systems. Here is just one more area where the
lack of efficient decentralisation undermined the outcomes of this important
exercise.


Universality, simultaneity and periodicity very simply mean “rigour and
comprehensiveness within a strictly defined timeframe”. The UN
recommendations are quite thorough in this regard, and since a number of
senior staffers in the GSS today have been exposed to the highest levels of
the UN statistical system, we fail to understand their lack of care in these
matters.


All is however not lost.


We are in the post-enumeration survey and review phase, as we understand it.
The GSS can begin to focus on developing robust statistical and data
management techniques to identify lags and laps in the collected data and
start to make amends.


The data analysis and presentation can be approached with seriousness to
take into account ease of retrieval, privacy protections, cross-referencing,
and incorporation into other datasets in Ghana, particular within the local
government system.


We of course shall go ahead with our petition to relevant bodies, but our
hope is that the petition shall be made redundant by a renewed effort on the
part of the GSS to address the concerns many have expressed about the
census, prior to releasing the preliminary report. Furthermore, the GSS
shall have one whole year to make amends before they release the official
report in 2012.


We have never argued that the GSS is staffed by incompetents. What we have
said is that they have not over the period that we and many other
independent commentators have been observing them shown full dedication to
their mandate of supplying credible, quality, data. And that’s a tragedy.


That can change. And, for all our sakes, we hope it will.



*Courtesy of IMANI (www.imanighana.org) & AfricanLiberty.org*