The Ghana Statistics Service (GSS) on Friday inaugurated a three-member Regional Management Team to oversee the coordination and implementation of activities regarding the upcoming Agriculture Census in the Greater Accra Region.

The composition of the team is: the Regional Coordinating Director as Chairperson, the Regional Director of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture as Member and the Regional Statistician as the Secretary.

Mr John Nortey, Deputy Director of Statistics, Research and Information Department of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) said the team would be responsible for the provision of facilities for all activities of the Census operations.

It would also be responsible for ensuring effective Census education and publicity, resolve all problems relating to the Census and facilitate information sharing and dissemination of results in the Region.

Mr Nortey explained that the Census was in accordance with the Constitutional mandate of the GSS, to collect, compile, analyse, publish and disseminate official statistics on all activities in the country.

He said the same constitution also enjoins the GSS to collaborate with the Ministries, Department and Agencies that matter, to perform its functions when necessary. In line with this provision, the GSS, the MoFA and other stakeholders are in the process of conducting a Census of Agriculture in Ghana that will span a period of 48 months starting from December 2013 to December 2017.

He said the Census of Agriculture is a statistical operation covering the whole country and allows for the collection, processing, publishing and dissemination of information on the structure and general information about agricultural activities in the country and also the state of development of the rural areas.

He said data would be collected directly from households and the communities at large, mainly on the geography, availability of basic facilities, socio-economic conditions, transport infrastructure, community services, potentials for development and constraints. The occasion was also used to hold a User-Producer workshop of the Census of Agriculture for the Region.

Dr Philomena Nyarko, Government Statistician, explained that the GSS in collaboration with the MoFA, has since 2013, been working towards the conduct of the next Census of Agriculture in Ghana with technical assistance from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

She said as in previous rounds of the World Censuses of Agriculture, the FAO in collaboration with other experts, had made some recommendations and also provided guidelines for the collection of comprehensive information on agriculture in the 2010 Round of a similar Census. According to her, one of the innovative recommendations is the Modular Approach for the collection of agricultural data.

The programme of activities for the Census would be carried out in four phases, with the first phase, which is scheduled to be completed in December 2015, focusing on the technical and administrative preparations towards the execution of activities under the three other phases.

Dr Nyarko said the second phase, which involved the Core and Community Level Modules on production activities, would be implemented, with the Core Module consisting of the use of a short questionnaire to undertake complete enumeration of all households and their farm holdings and other related non-agriculture activities. The complete enumeration would produce updated sampling frames for more detailed studies in 2015 and also key benchmark indicators.

About 3,000 enumerators and 600 supervisors are envisaged to be involved in the administration of the Core Module and Community questionnaire. She said for a successful outcome, a pilot survey to test both Modules has been planned for July 6th to 31st, 2014, using about 20 enumerators and four supervisors. The objective of the pilot survey is to test the workability of the census documents and the field data collection organisation scheme.

Both Module questionnaires and data processing tools are expected to be finalised after evaluation and analysis of the pilot survey. The main data collection using both Modules would commence in October 2014 and end in December 2014. We expect that the preliminary results from the pilot census would be at the end of the first quarter of 2015.

She said in order to receive inputs from the public for the finalisation of the survey instruments, User-Producer workshops are being organised in all the regional capitals to, among others, solicit the views of all stakeholders regarding their data requirements and the use to which these data are put.