The Ghana Statistical Service, Vodafone Ghana and the Flowminder Foundation, an NGO that provides insights, tools and capacity-strengthening to governments, international agencies and NGOs, have embarked on a partnership to produce official statistics using identified telecommunications data to strengthen humanitarian and development decision-making in the country.

Under the partnership, some staff of the statistical agency are undergoing training on how to use data to solve critical problems and inform policy decisions.

The collaboration is aimed at taking advantage of technology to transform the production of official statistics.

Speaking to Citi Business News, a former Government Statistician and current chairperson of the GSS, Dr. Grace Bediako, says the project, which will end in 2020, will benefit Ghana immensely.

“This is part of what we have been calling big data. A lot of information housed in many service providers domain and in this case the telcos and we are working with Vodafone. So, we are hoping that this will help us bridge the data gaps because with the SDGs, there is a lot that we need to inform ourselves about and track; mobility is part of it,” she said.

Data Scientist and Project Manager at Flowminder, Tracey Li says the data will help the country in diverse ways.

“Our role in this project is to strengthen capacity within the GSS by way of providing tools, knowledge and skills to enable staff of GSS be able to process and analyze telecommunications data and incorporate that data into the production of official statistics,” she explained.

Source: www.citibusinessnews.com