Need for Data for Planning Cannot Be Ignored

The importance of research data for the purposes of diagnosis and appreciation of problems, planning and programming, implementation and evaluation of projects cannot be overemphasized in present day economic governance. Without proper data, strategic planning and projecting into the future as well as monitoring and addressing issues to pre-empt them from degenerating into crises become virtually impossible.

It was therefore not surprising when the subject of the non-existence of up-to-date data came up at the international conference on the Impact of Global Financial Crisis on West African States organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in collaboration with the Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE-USA) in Accra last week.

Dr. William Baah-Boateng, a lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Ghana, Legon, while presenting a paper on the Social Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis with Emphasis on Poverty, Unemployment, and Instability in West Africa, lamented how all efforts he made to get current data on poverty and unemployment in the various West African states yielded little results as the data was nowhere to be found.

It is indeed regrettable, to say the least, that in this day and age when the developed world is continuing to make giant strides in the fields of science and technology with research data as their backbone, the entire West African subregion with the exception of only a few countries can boast of current data on poverty and unemployment. The status quo cannot be the rule if the subregion is to make any meaningful headway in socio-economic development and to rid itself of poverty, squalor, diseases and unemployment, among other pertinent indices.

In the face of the race towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which is only five years away, the subregion cannot remain complacent else the goals will elude us just as others in the past. We cannot continue to wear the unenviable tag as one of the poorest subregions in the world; we must of course shed off that ‘threadbare cloth’ of poverty. But such a goal does not come by chance and nobody is going to thrust it upon us for altruistic reasons or out of magnanimity. The answer to the problem lies in proper, co-ordinated and integrated planning of which data is indispensable.

In many of the developed countries there is proper co-ordination between the world of work and job market in terms of numbers, hence unemployment is kept at the barest minimum. Besides, industry makes inputs into curriculum of the training institutions which ensure that those that join the labour market possess the requisite skills for employment. Data plays a crucial role in all these arrangements.

It will be a remote possibility to fight poverty and reduce unemployment to any appreciable degree if we do not have the data that tells us the extent of the twin incidents which have become the bane of economic progress of the subregion.

Public Agenda accordingly agrees with calls by participants at the financial crisis dialogue that governments in the subregion must invest in data collection in their respective countries to make possible the generation of current and accurate data which serves functional needs and not one meant for the archives. In the same vein, we equally concur with proponents that the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) Secretariat must also have data on issues such as poverty and unemployment to facilitate the overall development planning of the region.