Data is becoming the newgold and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) will continue to turn out credible data to accelerate national development, Government Statistician, Professor Samuel K. Annim, has said.

To the end, he said, the GSS would partner with big data companies in the country to generate data for national development.

Prof. Annim said this at the launch of this year’s Africa Statistics Week celebration in Accra yesterday.

The week-long programme is on the theme “moderninising national statistical systems to support socio-cultural development in Africa.”

African Statistics Week, an annual event, is celebrated on November 18, across the world to raise public awareness of the importance of statistics in all aspects of social and economic life.

As part of the programme, Vodafone, FlowminderFoundation and Digital Earth (DE) Africa, big data companies and partners of the African Statistics Week, programme showcased their products and services and programmes they were holding with GSS for produce data for national planning and development.

Prof.Annim, said data was critical for effective and evidence-based planning and decision making.

“Data is so important, it is a by-product of technology. We need to integrate data to deal with numerous challenges facing the country,” he said.

Prof. Annim pledged that the GSS would innovate and adopt new methodologies and partner with the big data companies in the country to produce and generate relevant data to accelerate national development.

“The objective of GSS is to become the trusted provider of official statistics for national development,” he said.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR), Professor Elvis Asare-Bediako, who delivered the keynote address, said Ghana needed to leverage on data to accelerate national development.

He said the world was currently depending on data andthat data had become new gold.

Prof.Asare-Bediako said the use of data would help Ghana achieve the goals of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Technical Manager for DE Africa, Edward Boamah said “Open, free and accessible data will be key to a sustainable future for Africa.”

“We are delighted to be involved in this fantastic event, showcasing the free analysis ready services that DE Africa has to offer. From monitoring water to studying crops to assessing deforestation and land degradation, DE Africa services help governments and industry to assess change and make informed decisions to tackle some of the continent’s greatest challenges.”

The Implementation Co-ordinator at the Flowminder Foundation, WoleAdemolaAdewole, said integrating such data into official statistics is a fairly new field of development and we are looking forward to applying our latest methods to support the government of Ghana.”

Vodafone Ghana alsohighlighted Data for Good project has just entered an exciting new phase of development and will focus over the next two years on turning data into actionable solutions beyond official statistics and COVID-19.

The event also featured a presentation of the Data for Good project, a flagship public-private partnership initiative in Ghana, making the most of mobility information from the analysis of de-identified and grouped telecommunications operator data.