Activities for the Northern Region training for the Ghana National Household Registry (GNHR) began in Tamale this weekend. The training of enumerators and supervisors will take place from Monday 20th July to Thursday 23rd July. Approximately 6,000 trainees are expected for this exercise.

Before the deployment of national trainers to their respective districts, Management of Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) met with the Independent Monitors recruited for the exercise.

The Government Statistician, the Deputy Government Statistician and the Chief Technical Advisor for the census were in attendance in addition to Chief Trainers and Deputy Chief Trainers.

The meeting was to discuss the roles of the Independent Monitors and share lessons learned from the listing exercise in the North East and Savannah districts.

One innovation of the GNHR listing exercise is the inclusion of Independent Monitors as part of fieldwork and is a strategy that will be considered for the 2020 Population and Housing Census.

18 Independent Monitors made up of the 15 Regional Statisticians and 3 external monitors have been engaged to cover the 17 districts in the Northern Region.

The overall responsibility of the Independent Monitor is to ensure that the output from the data collection to be sent to the client is satisfactory.

The client for this exercise is the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection which needs the GNHR to enable them to identify poor and vulnerable households for targeted interventions.

Independent Monitors will be representing GSS management in the district, monitoring the training and data collection, performing operational functions as needed and taking on the leadership role to ensure that the listing exercise is conducted successfully in their districts.