The Ghana National Household Registry (GNHR) has resumed work in the Upper West Region a break to resolve some problems confronting its work.
Its work, an exercise aimed at getting data on the number of households in the country, was initiated by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection in August 2016.
Touring the Upper West Region on Friday, the national coordinator for the exercise, Mr. Robert Austin, disclosed that some problems bedeviled the exercise when it was started and this forced the GNHR to halt operations to resolve the problems.
He said, “when we started we realised some problems with the exercise. These problems had to do with the software which was being used and the battery life of the device used to capture the data we need. So we decided to pause to resolve these problems and I am glad we did because we have resolved those problems.”
He added that though the break put a strain on their timelines, they were now working faster than when they started because the software had been worked on to make the work of enumerators easy.
“We have now registered about 50,000 more in addition to the 30,000 we registered prior to our taking of a break. So now we have registered about 80,000 households in the Upper West Region,” Mr Austin said.
The national coordinator further disclosed that most of their work would now be concentrated in the urban areas since they had finished with work in the rural areas.
According to Mr. Austin,” we have finished with work at the peripheral of the region and we are now moving to the urban areas. Our challenge, however, is that we are unable to track people in the urban centres due to their work schedules. We have, therefore, revised our approach and will be doing early morning and late evening registration.”
On the importance of the exercise, Mr. Austin disclosed that it would help the government and organisations measure the impact of social intervention programmes in the country.
He said, “if you look at the social intervention programmes we have in the country, it is difficult to measure the impact. So when this is done we can measure the real impact of these programmes.”
“It would also ensure that the intervention gets to those it is intended for as the data captured will indicate how poor the registrants are.”
The GNHR is expected to conclude work in the Upper West Region by November 15, 2016 and data captured made available for use by January 2017.
<<Print>>