Cause of high rural/urban migration identified
The high spate of rural urban migration in the country has been attributed to the large number of businesses in the urban centres to the neglect of the rural areas, a report from a research conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has revealed.
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According to the report, more than 82 per cent of these business establishments are mainly found in the services sector, including the financial institutions. Supported by the World Bank and the government of Ghana, the survey covered critical areas such as industrial agriculture, mining, manufacturing, energy, construction and finance.
The acting Government Statistician, Mr Baah Wadieh, said this at the launch of the Regional Spatial Business Report (RSBR) and District Business Registers (DBRs) in Accra last Tuesday. “The report reveals that more than a quarter of the non-household establishments in Ghana are located in the Greater Accra Region alone, indicating the skewness of the location of establishments,” he said, adding that “the majority of these establishments, across the regions and districts of the country, are found in the services sector.”
Mr Wadieh also stated that about a tenth of the various establishments were formal, while the rest were informal.
Purpose of reports
The RSBR and DBRs, also known as Integrated Business Establishment Survey (IBES), will among others, provide reliable, timely and relevant economic data for the country to help in planning and policy formulation.
The first phase of the IBES was to provide a business register of all establishments to serve as the basis for enhanced policy formulation and effective decision-making by the government and business community.
Phase one started in January 2014; however, fieldwork which involved deploying trained field personnel numbering about 7,500 to visit every local community in Ghana to collect basic data on establishments, started in September 2014 and ended in February 2015.
Mr Wadieh indicated that the first phase of IBES was basically designed to provide a business register for the whole country.
“It is also observed that more than three-quarters of the number of establishments across most of the regions and districts, including this region are micro-sized, which suggests that medium-sized and large-sized firms are less represented in Ghana,” he added.
Data collection
Briefing the media after the launch, the Head of Industrial Statistics at the GSS, Mr Anthony Krakah, said the fieldworkers encountered a lot of challenges in the collection of data from the public.
He cited instances where some businesses either refused to give out accurate information or denied them the opportunity to obtain information available with the fear of breach of confidence.
He used the opportunity to assure the public that the service would not in any way release data about an individual or organisation to their competitors, adding “supplying the service with wrong information will lead to misleading the public and could have dire consequences on policy planning.”
Commenting on how to resolve rural unemployment, Mr Krakah, who is also the IBES Coordinator, stated that there was the need for the government to implement programmes that would increase the number of businesses in the rural areas in order to create a lot of jobs.
He, however, called on the government to look at the peculiar challenges of the various rural areas across the country before setting up businesses.
