The Board and Management of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) have launched the 2022 – 2027 Data Science Roadmap.

The document which lays out the strategy for integrating data science into the production and dissemination of official and experimental statistics, as well as operations of the Service was launched during the African Statistics Day celebration on Friday 18th November 2022.

The roadmap’s opening statement notes that “Data Science has the potential to improve, streamline, and automate the production of currently-released statistics as well as serve as an enabler in the creation of new statistics.” For these reasons, the Statistical Service will intensify the use of data science in the next five years. GSS intends to apply data science for automation; standardization; and discovery of new data trends and analytical methods through machine learning.

The augmenting of statistical operations with data science will support the continued production of relevant and timely data to meet the demands of modern data users.

Some of the ways in which GSS will apply Data Science in the next few years will be by integrating online databases, developing a standardized reporting dashboard for real-time monitoring of census and survey data collection, use of satellite data to generate ecological statistics, and automating quality checks of trade data.

These will be in addition to the Data Science initiatives existing at GSS such as the analysis of call data records and the harnessing of the resourcefulness of Digital Earth Africa.

In line with the theme for this year’s African Statistics Day which is “Strengthening data systems by modernizing the production and use of agricultural statistics: informing policies with a view to improving resilience in agriculture, nutrition, and food security in Africa”, GSS Data Scientists have already developed an online Agricultural Statistic Dashboard Application.

The dashboard gives data users access to disaggregated statistics from the 2018 Ghana Census of Agriculture and administrative data from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The application was also launched on Friday 18th November 2022.