The Ghana National Household Registry (GNHR) has completed its household data collection exercise in the Northern, Savannah and North East regions.
The GNHR at a stakeholder data dissemination workshop in Tamale last Friday announced the registration of 90,993 households in the North East, 91,710 in the Savannah and 304,975 in the Northern Region, totaling 487,678 households.
The National Coordinator of the Ghana National Household Registry, Dr Prosper Laari, said the exercise is steadily progressing towards a single national household database on the poor and vulnerable in society.
According to him, the data when fully completed, will serve as a criterion for targeting beneficiaries of social protection programmes in the country and provide the catalyst to accelerate development in the regions.
The findings during the data collection, according to Dr Prosper Laari, are not only disturbing but serve as signal call of distress for all of us to put our shoulders to the wheel and work assiduously towards the development of our people.
He however expressed confidence that the various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in the regions would make good use of the available data for its population needs and development priorities in the communities.
Dr Laari added the data would also enhance academic and research work particularly for tertiary institutions across Ghana, adding that data is as good as its usage.
He said the GNHR is prepared to share the data without other development partners and nongovernmental organizations that operate in the regions of the North to enable their work.
Meanwhile, Head of the Local Government Service, Dr Stephen Nana Ato Arthur commended the government of Ghana for spending a colossal amount of money to generate this data.
He said the country is now exposed to more dependable and credible database compared to the past when there was unreliable data.
Dr Ato Arthur announced that the MMDAs are currently working on the 2022 to 2025 new Medium Term Development Plans and the GNHR data could not have come at any opportune time to offer the facts and figures and not approximations.
“Allow me to admonish all and sundry that they should make good use of the data in our day to day work by moving from approximations to exact figures because of the data availability” Dr Ato Arthur stressed.
For his part, the Northern Regional Minister, Mr. Shani Alhassan Shaibu, in his keynote address delivered by the Regional Coordinating Director recognized that sustainable development of every country hinges on the ability of that country to plan, implement, review and evaluate relevant policies and programmes that address the concerns of the poor, vulnerable and the needed in society.
He emphasized that any country desirous of achieving sustainable development is expected to give prominence to the concerns and issues of the vulnerable in society.
Mr Alhassan Shaibu explained it is for this reason that over the years Ghana has sought to unveil various projects and programmes to address the needs of the poor.
The Minister indicated governments over the years have made huge investments in various aspects of social protection such as the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Capitation Grant, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), the Ghana National School Feeding Programme and the most recent free Senior High School (SHS) policy.
“In unveiling these programmes the greatest recognition of the government is that they seem to address issues that would normalize society by bridging the gap between the poor and the rich. And those who have been involved in the implementation of these programmes recognise the challenges of implementation and the imbalances” he stressed.
