The move forms part of efforts of GSS to deepen partnership with both the public and private organisations.

The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel K. Annim, signed on behalf of GSS, while Dr James Tucker, the Deputy Director for Health, International Partnership, ONS UK signed on behalf of his organisation.

The MoU was signed during a stakeholder meeting on ‘Pushing the Frontiers of Statistics through Partnerships’ programme under the auspices of the Government of Ghana, Telecel, Flowminder. Org and ONS.

Meant to build strong part­nership between the public and private sector organisations, it was also used to launch the ‘Ghana 2024 Statistical Year Overview,’ which presents an overview of the publication of statistical prod­ucts by GSS in 2024.

Prof. Annim said the partner­ship between the ONS had been extended for one year.

He noted that ONS had supported GSS to automate the Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) computation processes, explain­ing that with the automation, the GSS could release the CPI a week ahead of time.

The ONS, Prof. Annim indicat­ed, had helped built the capacity of the data science staff of the GSS.

He called for stronger partner­ship between the GSS and public and private sector organisations to promote the use of data for policy planning to accelerate the country’s development, empha­sising the need for government policies to be driven by data in order to help achieve the desired outcomes.

Prof. Annim further stated that data was crucial and it was im­portant public and private organi­sations understood and generated quality data to influence national development planning decisions.

Prof. Annim also said the GSS would continue to push the frontiers of efficiency to get the highest returns on the investment being made in data collection in the country.

He noted that it was against that direction, that the GSS was collaborating with Telecel to make use of Call Detail Records (CDR) to generate data, for ex­ample on internal migration, for policy planning.

Among other benefits, the CDR information, which had been pseudomised not to reveal the identity of subscribers, would help in disaster response, pover­ty reduction, promote tourism, address traffic and transportation challenges, help in vaccination exercise, combating malaria and identifying hotspots of electoral violence during elections.

Additionally, the Government Statistician mentioned that the objective of GSS was to ensure policies were driven by data to op­timise the investment being made in data collection, adding that the purpose of the booklet was to provide highlights of publications and make them available on a digi­tal platform.

The Deputy Director for Health, International Partnership, Office of the National Statistics (ONS) of UK, Dr James Tucker, indicated that Ghana was the first country ONS was collaborating in its international collaboration.

Ghana, he said, had huge vol­umes of data and if exploited well would help facilitate the develop­ment of the country.

Dr Tucker stressed that national policies must be influenced with data.

The Chief Statistician and Dep­uty Director for Centre for Data Analysis, Foreign Commonwealth Development Office, Ms Sian Rasdale, said data must be packed in a manner people can easily accessed.