Government Statistician Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim has called for collaboration to build a central repository of data collected by different institutions in the country.
Prof. Kobina Annim said such a collaboration will ensure the integration of the various sets of data into a single data system as well as harmonize them to enable easy access and effective use.
He added that it will also save institutions from spending resources to gather data which has already been collected.
The Government Statistician was speaking at a Closing Ceremony of a 3-day preliminary of the 2024 Statistical Data Hackathon at the Bolgatanga Technical University to select teams of creative students to represent the school at the national competition.
“We have built our statistical online bank, and ours is the nation’s statistical online bank. We expect, like we see in other jurisdictions, that every university would have its own data repository where all the different data sets that we are collecting sits in one repository, which gives us the opportunity to compare, validate the data that we have, and more importantly, build a pipeline that will help us relate the data that sits with Bolgatanga Technical University with the statistical online bank that we have,” he stated.
“By so doing, we’ll be solving one of the major challenges that we have in the country, which has to do with a siloed approach in everything that we do. If it’s data, it is siloed. If it’s statistics, it is siloed. If it’s policy, it is siloed. So, we are moving in different directions, although we are trying to solve that same problem of livelihood transformation”.
BTU is among 6 technical universities participating in the second edition of the Statistical Data Hackathon aimed at promoting the use of data especially in the academia to address societal challenges.
Prof. Annim, while explaining the mandate of the Ghana Statistical Service in ensuring accountability, stated that the purpose of the competition is not just to find a winner but to bring out innovative ways of using data to make positive change.
Three teams to represent school at national Hackathon competition
Meanwhile, 3 teams of students have excelled at the school level Statistical Data Hackathon Competition and will be representing the institution at the national competition in November.
The school level competition commenced on September 25 and concluded on September 27, 2024 with 5 teams participating.
Within the 3-day period, the teams were tasked to mine data from various sources including the StatsBank to address pertinent societal challenges.
The groups took turns during the closing ceremony to present their work on various social issues including teenage pregnancy and unemployment.
