The two-day training, held in Tamale, was in support of the Ghana Agriculture Production (GAP) and Market Price Surveys conducted annually by the Statistics Research Information Directorate (SRID) of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

Mr Wallace Walter Lutterodt, Software Engineer at SRID, who gave details of the training, said previously staff of various departments of Agriculture relied on a manual system using a pencil and paper interviewing methodology to collect data, a situation which affected the quality of the data collected.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), through its Feed the Future initiative, Ghana Agriculture Policy Support Project (APSP) has assisted SRID to design, develop and implement the CAPI system of data collection.

This is to address the concerns on the data that SRID currently collects, especially with regard to data quality, relevance and its usefulness for policy-making purposes. Mr Walter Lutterodt said the CAPI system, which ensured collecting real-time mobile data on 3G Android tablets would help improve the quality and credibility of agricultural statistics as well as minimize human error in agriculture data collection and analysis.

He called for commitment on the part of participants as they use the technology to improve their work.