Wamfie — Mr Christopher Dapaah, Executive Director of Resource Link Foundation, has noted that wrong data has been a major bane to the development of Ghana, particularly at the District levels.

According to Mr Dapaah, Data is the life blood of state government, which is a crucial commodity necessary to manage projects, avoid fraud, assess program performance, keep the books in balance and deliver services efficiently, but most departments at the district level sometimes sit at their offices and cook data for reasons best known to them.

"Some heads of department sometimes inflate data to demand for huge budgets, with disregard to the economic effects it would have on the nation at a whole", he said

According to him, when data is flawed, the consequences could affect the entire government enterprise as services are needlessly duplicated, evaluation of successful programs is difficult, taxes go uncollected and infrastructure maintenance is conducted inefficiently.

Speaking at a Day's Workshop dubbed- "I AM AWARE DISTRICT LEVEL ENGAGEMENT", organized for various Departmental Heads and technocrats within the Dormaa East District at Wamfie, Mr Dapaah emphasized that the poor quality of government data "is probably the most important emerging trend for government executives across the board, at all levels."

He continued that Ghana can move forward to its desired destination if only its data system is looked into again, adding that the unrealistic data from the departments at the district level, through to the regional and national had caused the country's economic woes.

 The Executive Director of Resource Link Foundation explained that the "I AM AWARE" is CDD-Ghana's non-partisan citizen empowerment campaign, which collects, analyzes, archives and disseminates user-friendly socio economic data on the state of public goods and service delivery in Ghana.

It aims to empower citizens, particularly the poor and vulnerable, to improve their awareness and engagement with duty-bearers about public service delivery in order to make them more accountable and responsive; it is sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the USA.

source:The Chronicle