He told the Ghanaian Times on Wednesday that the year-long exercise will start next week and end in 2019 before the census takes off in 2020.

Mr Kombat said about 80 cartographic staff would be deployed to start updating the EAs in Upper East, Upper West, Northern regions and subsequently roll over the country.

“The Ghana Statistical Service, prepares toward the conduct of the 2020 Population and Housing Census, there is the need to update all EAs in the country, that is splitting large EAs to reasonable sizes and amalgamating those EAs that are found to be small,” he said.

Mr Kombat explained that EAs are the smallest spatial unit for an enumerator to work during census period and covers averagely 500 people in 125 households, given a household in Ghana to contain four persons.

The last census in 2010 involved 37,000 EAs and Mr Kombat said the mapping  of the EAs had  become necessary  due to migration and other factors that made people move from their current  locations to new settlements.

“The EAs are dynamic and are subject to change with changes in population characteristics and so there is the need for their update just before a population census take place,” the acting Government Statistician in charge of Operations explained.

He cited the example of Adabraka in the Greater Accra Region where most of the dwelling homes have been converted into stores and the people moved to different locations “so there is the need to go and update the place by adding more houses to make an EA.”

The acting Deputy Government Statistician said the exercise would also involve district boundaries delineation exercise to ensure that newly created districts have well-defined physical boundaries to enable the creation of EAs in those areas.

“A total of 76 districts would be visited, 38 new districts and 38 old districts from which the new districts were created. Specifically, the exercise will bring together officials of newly created districts and adjoining districts to agree on localities that constitute the new district to avoid disputes during the census enumeration,” he explained.

Mr Kombat said the GSS was also in the processes of selecting the topics to be covered in the census for a stakeholder meeting to agree on the questionnaire.

Ghana has chequered history of pre-colonial and post colonial censuses which is carried out every ten years, to generate data on the structure, distribution and other characteristic s in the population that are needed for development planning.

The last count put Ghana’s population at little over 24 million people. The population is now estimated at 29.6 million people and expected to rise to 31 million people in 2020.

The GSS is also currently undertaking agriculture census to generate accurate and reliable data on the country’s agricultural status for development planning.