What are population processes?

World Population Day is on July 11th so we will spend the lead up to the day highlighting some basic concepts in the field of population. 

Today we start with population processes.

Population processes are the three factors that lead to changes in the size and composition of the population. These are fertility, mortality, and migration. 

Western Region passes 1,000 cases and national count passes 15,000

2,820 new cases of covid-19 have been confirmed in Ghana since our update last week bringing the total to 15,013 cases. A little over half of the new case (1521) were in Greater Accra and almost a quarter were from Ashanti (640).

Sources of population and health data

We utilize a number of publicly available data sources on this blog and today we highlight those sources to encourage data utilization. Data is important because it can be used to generate evidence to make informed decisions, to help solve problems, to plan and make predictions, provide support of arguments etc.


Most international development agencies have databases with a variety of indicators that do not require any statistical analysis and can be used by anyone. These include demographic data from the U.N; health data from the WHO; development data from the World Bank; labour force data from the ILO; and education data from UNESCO.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) collect a wealth of demographic and health information and conduct repeated  surveys in countries which allows for looking at time trends. These surveys produce detailed reports that present a considerable amount of data.

Over 2,000 covid-19 cases recorded in Ghana in the past week

Greater Accra contributed about a third of new cases, the highest percent as usual but the region's contribution to new cases has been declining - more than half of new cases were from Greater Accra a month ago. Ashanti contributed about a quarter of new cases with Western, Central and Upper East contributing about a tenth each. 

Upper East's numbers have increased substantially since our update last week - from 42 to 241 cases