50,000 enumerators involved in Ghana’s 2010 Census
Fifty thousand (50,0000) enumerators have been trained for Ghana’s ongoing census which began on Sunday, September 26.
The enumerators have been spread across the entire length and breadth of the country, to ensure every Ghanaian citizen is counted in the ongoing exercise.
Disclosing this to ghanabusinessnews.com yesterday in an exclusive interview, Michael Adu Gyamfi, Communications and Media Officer of the Ghana Statistical Service and PRO for the National Census Secretariat, expressed optimism that in view of the large number of well trained enumerators on the field, there is no way any Ghanaian citizen would be left out in the exercise.
The Census PRO intimated that before the final selection of the 50,000 enumerators, some aspiring census officials had to be dropped, after four major examinations had been conducted, to ensure they had only the best persons to conduct the nationwide exercise.
“This work is not as easy as some people think; that is why when we asked some people to drop, people thought maybe we were trying to discriminate, but it is of the fact that after the training, we conducted four different exams, so it was based on the exams that we selected people for supervisory work and enumeration and all that,” he elucidated.
He said that two weeks is being used for the census instead of a day, to ensure that everyone gets an equal chance to be counted. “That is why we are using two weeks; otherwise we could have used just a day, but we are using two weeks to do this exercise,” he stated.
Responding to snippets of information to which ghanabusinessnews.com is privy to, that some locations in Ghana are not on the areas mapped out for enumeration, Mr. Adu Gyamfi said “We have divided the country into 38,000 enumeration areas, we have covered the whole country and we are going to every corner to count people there, because we did a trial census and we identified all the various places that people do not know, places that people don’t go.”
“So if it were not for this census, there are certain places that people will not know that people live there,” he added.
The PRO explained that because they felt selecting enumerators for any region could create problems, they decided to let the enumerators work in the regions they come from. “Because we thought there will be a problem if we should pick somebody from Greater Accra to Eastern Region, somebody from Northern Region to Eastern Region, we thought there would be a problem, the people we recruited are coming from the same local areas,” he said.
He added that the step was also taken so that there wouldn’t be any language barrier during the two-week long exercise.
By Edmund Smith-Asante