The exercise, which will be carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, is meant to assess the resourcefulness of the 261 MMDAs and help to gauge the extent to which the resource endowments of each district were being depleted.

The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, disclosed this to the Daily Graphic at a high-level forum on Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) organised by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The forum discussed the country’s preparedness to mainstream natural capital, encompassing the environment, energy, minerals, agricultural land, forest, biodiversity and other quantifiable aspects of nature into the country's national accounting system on the economy. 

MoU

Prof. Annim said a memorandum of understanding (MoU) would be signed between the GSS and the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry before the end of the year. 

"My technical staff at the GSS are working in collaboration with the experts from the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry on the draft document. I am looking forward to receiving the draft document by the mid of next month (July),” he said.

The GSS staff would peruse it within one month, revert to the ministry at the end of August towards signing a framework of cooperation before the end of the year, Prof. Annim said.

The Government Statistician explained that apart from providing a framework to assess the districts’ resource wealth, the initiative would provide reliable data that would facilitate effective allocation of money to the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF). 

Prof. Annim said when the project was rolled out, it would improve local revenue mobilisation, adding "this is critical because if we are not able to institute mechanisms with certainty on how much resources we can mobilise in our individual districts, then we will not be too sure about the extent to which the DACF allocation will be able to sustain the MMDAs."

The Government Statistician indicated that the overall target of the GSS was to work towards making the country a statistics-driven economy. 

Policies

He said aside from the production of comprehensive data on both natural and artificial resources, the GSS was focused on making the data have a stronger link with policy.

"What we want to do is to profile all policies of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and assess these policies on the perspective of the representativeness of statistical targets in the policy documents, whether the targets are consistent with targets across other sources," he said. 

He said such a move would help the GSS to know targets that had been reached and those lagging behind which the MDAs needed to restrategise to accomplish.

The Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Kodjo Esseim Mensah-Abrampah, observed that the gathering of relevant data on the natural and artificial resources of the country was crucial for effective allocation and utilisation of resources for sustainable development.

He stressed the need for more inter-agency and cross-sectional collaboration and coordination to help determine the country’s natural capital. 

"An effective policy is one that makes use of data and relevant information. It is not just one sector pursuing its policies that will give us results; it requires many related sectors working together and collaborating to achieve results. The policies must be well coordinated such that they relate and complement each other," Dr Mensah-Abrampah added.

He said the move to establish the natural resource wealth of each district was important because it would provide an opportunity to add on to the existing data such that no variable is left out in the planning and execution of the country’s development agenda.

"Local government institutions play a key role in development; but sometimes the development is uneven because some have an advantage over others in terms of resources,” the director-general said.

He added that some of the local assemblies were endowed with resources they were unable to optimise and some even wasted them. 

“With this new development, we will have an idea of the kind of waste we are throwing into the system and analyse the gaps relative to natural resources," Dr Mensah-Abrampah said.