Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, the government statistician observed that the 2021 Population and Housing Census demonstrates the urgent need for the country to invest heavily in its youth and to initiate conversations about population settlement.
Presenting the preliminary report on the 2021 PHC to President Akufo-Addo at the Jubilee House on Wednesday 27 October, 2021 Prof Annim noted that there are four major findings of census that should immediately engage the attention of the government.
Enumerating four key areas Prof. Annim said “The first point has to do with engagement with the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralization and Rural Development for them to start having conversations around what informs the settlement of population”.
The second thing that we want to take away is that the a-set distribution point to a pyramid which show that our population remains useful but the threat in there is that the share of the youth is declining so we need to take advantage of the returns of the demographic dividend and invest more in the youth, Prof. Annim noted.
According to Professor Annim, the third area is “preprimary education”. “While we give a lot of commendation to the Free SHS complimenting basic education, there is a lot of deprivation and underserved population at the preprimary level.
“Following our ratification of the free and compulsory universal basic education, we need to begin to focus on the kindergarten, three to four-year-olds and we realize that this is very stake in terms of the deprivation in quite a number of areas,” he said.
The last area that need attention by virtue of the findings of the PHC are crowding and disparities when it comes to social services.
“We do acknowledge the huge investments in the different interventions that are being made and here, we make reference to Agenda 111, which came up in August 2021”.
“But what we are calling for now is in as much as these interventions are welcomed, we always need to be guided by two things; are they addressing the crowding that we are seeing in places like Greater Accra, and more importantly, are they addressing the disparities that we see in especially, the newly created regions” Professor Annim said.
