Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, the Government Statistician, said this at the inauguration of the National Census Publicity, Education and Advocacy Committee for the 2020 Population and Housing Census (PHC), in Accra.

The trial census will take place in the Kpone Katamanso Municipality in the Greater Accra Region, Aowin Municipality in the Western North Region, Ekumfi District in the Central Region and Krachi-Nchumuru in the Oti Region, he said.

The trial census, he said, would sharpen the preparation of the GSS and enable it to identify any foreseeable challenges ahead of the national census, next year.

Professor Annim said on Friday, October 25, the GSS would inaugurate Regional and District Census Implementation Committees for the four districts where the trial census would take place.

He said field officers who would undertake the trial census would undergo training and be equipped with the needed skills for the exercise.

He said a four-member technical team would be inaugurated at the regional and district levels to supervise the census.

The technical team, he said, would comprise a Data Quality Monitor, an ICT Officer, District Census Officer and Zonal Field Supervisor to coordinate data collection exercises and ensure that the data collected is accurate and reliable.

The Government Statistician said that the President accented to the Statistical Service Act, (Act 1003) a month ago, with section 33 of the Act stating that, Ghana will have a national census every 10 years.

He expressed the readiness of the Service to conduct a successful exercise, saying that it has received the requisite logistical and financial resources from Government for the census.

The first census conducted in the then Gold Coast was in 1891.

The last time the nation conducted a national census was in 2010, which recorded a population of 24.2 million.

The result implied that Ghana's population increased by 30.4 per cent over the 2000 population figure of 18.9 million.