Ghana has started its first fully digital national Housing and Population Census (PHC) in a bid to capture the nation’s exact demographics for better national development.

Ghana’s last census was done in 2010, which put the number of the population at 24.6 million.

The 2020 census was postponed to 2021 due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the Ghana Statistics Service (GSS), there are 67,419 field enumerators deployed to collect data nationwide and to collect data on digital tablets within the borders of the West African country.

Samuel Annim, Chief Government Statistician, said that the enumerators would target persons travelling, persons in short-stay institutions such as health facilities, hotels, and prisons, and those considered homeless at their locations.

“The counting that we do at GSS during a PHC is the snapshot of the population, and it is an all-inclusive exercise,” added the government statistician.

He urged all those within the country as of the commencement of the census to make themselves available to be counted since the population numbers would help in planning for various sectors of the country’s socio-economic architecture.

The Field Operations Manager at the GSS, Peter Takyi Peprah, said in an interview that the digital data collection marked a significant difference between the 2021 census and the previous ones.

“The digitisation will help us deliver results more promptly and accurately than we used to have with the paper and pen data collection in the past,” he stated.

Dennis Agyemang, a Ghanaian bus driver, said that he was glad to have been counted on Sunday night since that would help the government to plan well in developing the country.