Samuel Kobina Annim
The Ghana Statistical Service in Partnership with the Ministry of Education has launched the Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 8 (GLSS 8) to provide statistics on living conditions.
GLSS is a nationally representative household survey that provides reliable, disaggregated, and internationally comparable statistics on the welfare and living conditions of individuals and households in Ghana.
Ghana has conducted seven rounds of the GLSS since 1987, with a five-year interval between each round, and each survey field data collection spanning 12 months.
Government Statistician, Samuel Kobina Annim, said the GLSS 8 survey will be carried out in 1,710 clusters across the country and involve 25,650 households.
The scope covers areas such as Education and literacy, mortality, health and wellbeing, and household agriculture. economic activity, household income, migration and consumption and expenditure remittances, and household assets.
Others include anthropometry, non-farm enterprises ICT, household food security housing, prices of consumer items governance, savings, assets, credit, peace and security insurance, and investment.
The exercise which is expected to begin with a pretest from July to August 2024 will end with dissemination and policy engagement between March 2025 to July 2026.
Deputy Minister for Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, indicated that the GLSS round 8 is set to focus primarily on gathering information on functional literacy and numeracy skills of children aged 4-17 years with education as the thematic area.
Mr. Fordjour also explained that the Ghana 2021 Population and Housing Census indicates that about 7.9 million persons aged six years and older were illiterates, adding that, “the illiterate population of individuals aged 15 years and older in Ghana has surged by over a million between 2010 and 2021”.
He stated that the census provides self-reported data on literacy, highlighting the need for direct literacy assessments to evaluate the effect of education policies and programs.
He further urged the Ghana Statistical Service to provide adequate learning to their field officers, and provide them with the needed resources and support to collect reliable data on learning in the various listed households.
By Janet Odei Amponsah