The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection has engaged stakeholders on the need to fully own the Ghana National Household Registry (GNHR) exercise to better the lives of the vulnerable.
The GNHR is projected to collect data in the Central Region by the first week of July.
So far, the nationwide data collection exercise, expected to end in 2025, has been successfully done in the Upper West, Upper East, Northern, North-East and Savannah regions.
It is aimed at identifying the poor and vulnerable for social intervention and protection programmes.
Dr Richard Adjetey, the Head of GNHR, at a consensus-building workshop, said household data collection was critical in ensuring that people in deplorable communities who needed genuine social interventions were traced.
The workshop brought together administrators, metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives, the media, and representatives of the Regional Coordinating Council.
Since its establishment in 2016, the Registry had put in place institutional systems and policy regimes to scale up social protection programmes.
He said interventions like the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, National Health Insurance Scheme, and a host of others depended solely on the credible data of the Registry.
In the Central Region, the GNHR would use both the census and mobile registration approach.
The census approach targeted districts with high poverty rates while the mobile registration was for districts with low poverty rates, he said.
Speaking on the registration stages, Dr Adjetey explained that the Registry first builds consensus of stakeholders, recruits district field officers, involves community focal persons, and lists structures before the data collection exercise actually begins.
“We are also looking at an inclusive development, where we would make provisions for data collection for persons with disability,” he added.
The Ghana Statistical Service says the poverty rate has reduced from 24.2 per cent in 2013 to 23.4 per cent in 2017, Mr Mawutor Abloh, the Regional Director of Gender and Social Protection, said.
The reduction, he noted, was as a result of the numerous sustainable actions of poverty reduction to address the growing inequality in the country.
To sustain the achievement, he said there was the need to continue to develop mechanisms to directly link beneficiaries to the programmes, hence the establishment of GNHR.
Mr Abloh said the data would not only be used for the selection of beneficiaries but would also be used for planning purposes because it provided information on the status of socio-economic development in every district.
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