The report that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has celebrated Ghana’s latest ranking as one of the most peaceful nations in the world and called on Ghanaians to help maintain the peace in the country is one of the trending stories in the Ghanaian press on Thursday.
The Ghanaian Times reports that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has celebrated Ghana’s latest ranking as one of the most peaceful nations in the world, and has called on Ghanaians to help maintain the peace in the country.
Ghana has been named the most peaceful country in West Africa and second most peaceful country in Sub-Saharan Africa, falling behind only Mauritius on the 2021 Global Peace Index (GPI)
The index, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), an independent non-profitable organisation, ranked Ghana the 38th most peaceful country in the world.
President Akufo-Addo celebrated the feat with a post on social media and called on Ghanaians to help maintain the country’s position as one of the most peaceful nations in the world.
“Let’s continue to maintain the peace we have in Ghana,” the President tweeted yesterday.
Ghana beats countries like the United States, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Russia, Mexico, among others, in the 2021 GPI.
The index ranked Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark, Portugal, and Slovenia to be the most peaceful countries, and Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, and Iraq to be the least peaceful.
The GPI measures the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness and ranks 172 independent states and territories according to their levels of peacefulness.
The newspaper says that the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has commenced the Annual Household and Income Expenditure Survey (AHIES 2022) for selected households in the country, a press statement issued by the GSS and copied to the Ghanaian Times yesterday said.
The survey was launched following a two-day virtual and 17-daysface-to-face training of 280 Field Officers.
The AHIES 2022 is a survey whose main objective is to obtain data to estimate quarterly and annual household final consumption expenditure to support the compilation of quarterly and annual GDP by the expenditure approach.
Outcomes from the AHIES exercise include the rebasing of the GDP, the generation of data to support monitoring of targets under 12 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and continuous provision of indicators on the welfare of persons in Ghana.
Some of the key macroeconomic indicators to be generated from the AHIES include, quarterly GDP, regional GDP, quarterly unemployment, graduate unemployment, underemployment, inequality, growth elasticity of poverty, consumption expenditure poverty and multidimensional poverty.
Further, the AHIES as the first of such panel survey will provide important data on labour and welfare mobility to better understand some of the dynamics in the labour market and how households move in and out of poverty.
The AHIES Coordinator and Head of National Accounts Statistics at the Ghana Statistical Service, Mr Francis Bright Mensah, reminded the field officers on the importance of the AHIES which would enhance the sources of data for GDP computation.
He stressed the importance of collecting quality data and the mechanisms put in place for quality assurance such as the constitution of Data Quality Monitoring Teams and a dashboard for real-time data quality monitoring.
He stated that the survey would produce reports at the end of each quarter. As such, it was necessary that the data collected would be of high quality to facilitate timely release of results.
The funding for the survey is a World Bank loan to the Government of Ghana.
The Graphic reports that the country has assumed its membership of the United Nations (UN) Security Council.
In line with that, a flag raising ceremony was held at the UN to signify the official admission of Ghana and four other countries that were elected last June to start their tenure.
They will serve on the Security Council from January 1, 2022 to December 2023.
This will be the third time Ghana is holding a non-permanent seat on the council that leads the world organisation’s agenda on peace, the threat to it and security of member countries.
Ghana first served on the council in the 1960s with the most recent being the period between January 2006 to December 2007.
At a ceremony at the media stake-out area of the council, the flag of Ghana, as well as Gabon, Brazil, United Arab Emirates and Albania were hoisted.
With the admission of Ghana and Gabon, Africa now has three countries on the 15-member UN body, with Kenya having been on it since January 2021.
And in November 2022, Ghana is expected to preside over the council.
The newspaper says that Cuba has pledged to increase its support for Ghana’s education sector to help fast-track the country’s economic transformation agenda.
The Cuban Ambassador to Ghana, Mrs Anette Chao Garcia, who announced this, said her office would soon engage the Education Ministry to discuss various ways her country could support the sector to grow.
“The people of Cuba are very happy with the state of development in Ghana and so I am here to find means of contributing towards sustaining this noble achievement by the government of Ghana,” she said.
The ambassador mentioned special education and science, technical, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as some intervention programmes that could be of benefit to the country.
Mrs Garcia, who was speaking during a courtesy call on the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, in Accra yesterday, added that her country would also offer more scholarships to Ghanaian students to study in Cuba.
The ambassador commended Dr Adutwum for agreeing to “come home” to contribute to the development of education in the country, and entreated other Ghanaians abroad to emulate the good example of the minister.
For his part, the minister said the government was poised to turn the fortunes of the nation around through education; hence the need to boost the training of needed human capital to push the nation’s development agenda.
According to him, the government was on course to improve the teaching and learning of STEM at all levels of education, saying the nation could not be left behind in the fast developing world.
GIK/APA