The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) is whipping up enthusiasm among residents in the Tema West Municipality to ensure their full participation in the ongoing 2021 Population and Housing Census.
Mr Fidel Bortey, the Tema West Director of the NCCE, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said the Commission held regular public engagements with residents to educate them on the importance to participate in the national exercise.
He said activities hit the upper scale with civic advocacy, which started within the 30-days count-down to the Census Night, and subsequently continued to marshal the public to participate.
Mr Bortey said giving information to the enumerators was a civic duty to ensure the nation had adequate data to plan and asked the people to volunteer information, especially on Persons with Disability, to enable government to make adequate allocations for them.
Dr Ernest Kwame Affum, the District Field Officer for Tema West, explained that households must not be afraid to receive the enumerators, adding that “if you doubt the identity of any of the enumerators check his or her ID card”.
He said the Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) had a hotline for respondents to call to verify the identity of the enumerators and that the officials had ID cards, reflector jackets, and other materials that made them easily identifiable.
“We are doing this not for the enumerators or the government but for ourselves, and the data that would be collected would be for the sole purpose of the GSS to analyse and give us something as a country to plan with.”
“Please don’t insult our enumerators or open your dogs on them,” he appealed.
Dr Affum encouraged enumerators to be patient with the respondents because they would encounter people with different attitudes.
“We want to achieve complete coverage, meaning that we want all persons within the Tema West Municipality to be enumerated within the two-week period; we also want quality data, so we don’t want anyone to cut corners; we don’t want anyone to jump structures or any persons within any household,” he said.
Dr Affum appealed to the public not to tell lies, which was against the law, but to give accurate information for government to work with.
“We all want to live in a civilized society. We all want to see development in our various communities. Nations that have advanced used data to manage their country and they have data on almost anything that their people are doing, so this exercise is important,” he said.
