Ghana Statistical Service to start quarterly labour market surveys

In an interview with Accra-based Joy FM, Prof Annim said they will conduct the new labour survey in collaboration with the Ministry for Employment and Labour Relations.

“We have started discussions with the Minister for Employment and Labour Relations, we are institutionalizing this meeting in such a way that the framework for developing the quarterly labour market survey would be jointly owned by the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations and the Ghana Statistical Service.”

“So moving into the phase between 2020 and 2024, what we seek to do is to roll out a quarterly labour market survey which will put us in a position to capture labour issues, labour statistics on a more regular basis,” Prof. Anim added.

He explained that the will not use a cross-section of respondents but rather “we are going to follow a cohort of individuals so that we will be in a position of not only generating employment and unemployment figures but to capture labour mobility and that is one of the contentions in terms of whether when we set up industries it’s people who are simply moving around jobs or we are creating jobs where people that hitherto were not in employment are now in employment.”

“Now we are working with an unemployment figure that dates back to 2017 and that’s when we did our last Living Standards Survey and we are in 2020,” he said.

The country currently relies on the Ghana Living Standards Survey and the Census. These are gathered every five years to determine unemployment figures. But the government statistician describes this as an inefficient way of tracking labour mobility.