International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day - a day to shine a spotlight on gender inequality.

The recent Afrobarometer press release indicated that women in Ghana continue to lag behind males in a number of areas - financial decision-making, political interest and participation, ownership of key assets and education. We have commented earlier on some of the gender differences in science in Ghana.

The U.N provides the sobering information that not a single country has achieved gender equality out of a 129 studied and additionally none are on track to meet the gender-based Sustainable Development Goal indicators.

Sustainable Development Goal 5 which seeks achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls is the main SDG on gender. Today we present three SDG5 indicators for Ghana using available data from the 2017/2018 Multiple Cluster Indicator Survey (MICS).

PHC 2020: You count, Get counted

District Census Implementation Committees (DCIC) are being inaugurated all over the country. One of the features of the 2020 PHC is the decentralization of operations to the district level. Each district in the country is to have a DCIC to oversee the conduct of the census within their district. The committee's responsibilities include sensitization and raising awareness on the census, recruitment of enumerators from the district, facilitation of conflict resolution and acquisition of office space for coordination of district census activities etc. The main purpose of the DCIC is to ensure that the census exercise is carried out successfully and all persons who spend census night in their district are enumerated.

Today we outline why it is important that everyone be enumerated in a census in our PHC 2020 series.

Our countdown to the 2020 census continues...

We are counting down to Ghana's 2020 Population and Housing Census by reflecting on the importance of this exercise. 

According to the United Nations, “The population and housing census is part of an integrated national statistical system, which may include other censuses (for example, agriculture), surveys, registers and administrative files. It provides, at regular intervals, the benchmark for population count at national and local levels. For small geographical areas or sub-populations, it may represent the only source of information for certain social, demographic and economic characteristics. For many countries the census also provides a solid framework to develop sampling frames.”

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science

It's also that time of the year in Ghana where the annual National Science and Math Quiz (NSMQ) excitement begins to build across the country. A look at the winner's list indicates that no girls school has ever won the competition in its 25 year history. A mixed-sex school has won twice in 1998 and 2004; all other winners have been all boys schools.

Girls tend to lag behind boys in science, globally and not just in Ghana. Females lag behind males in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields - both in school and in the labour force. Females are more likely to enrolled in STEM educational programmes or working in STEM jobs.