A nine member Municipal Census Implementation Committee for the La Dade-Kotopon Municipal Assembly (LaDMA) was inaugurated on Thursday 20th February 2020 at the municipal assembly hall, La.
The committee has the municipal coordinating director (MCD), Mr. Daniel Nkrumah as the chairperson. Other members are the traditional council representative, the municipal health director, the municipal information officer, the municipal director for National Commission of Civic Education, the municipal planning officer, the municipal education director, the municipal statistics officer and the municipal census officer Mr. Nathaniel Addo as the secretary to the committee.
The Presiding Member for the assembly, Hon Emmanuel Baah, who inaugurated the committee, tasked them to ensure a successful implementation of the exercise. The mandate of the committee is to help supervise all the activities during the Pre-census stage, main census stage and post census stage.
Mr. Daniel Nkrumah who on behalf of the MCE, Hon. Solomon Nikoi Kotey addressed the committee and the assembly members underscored the importance of the 2020 Population and Housing Census. According to him, the PHC will provide a platform for an interactive dialogue between Users and Providers of official statistics in the development planning and monitoring of policies and programmes. He put emphasis on that; the outcome of the census will improve policy-making in the municipality as the importance of census data in development planning and implementation is key.
The MCE bemoans the assembly’s inability to rake in the needed revenue from the ratepayers because the assembly does not have a reliable data on the properties in the municipality and has affected it internally generated fund (IGF), thereby depriving the assembly from meeting, the developmental needs of the people.
He said as part of the efforts in mitigating the challenge, the assembly is collaborating with GIZ to revalue all properties in the municipality and at the same time building a comprehensive database to support revenue mobilization. The MCE described the 2020 PHC as a huge opportunity for the assembly to plan. According to Mr. Nikoi Kotey, the population and housing census was an indispensable tool for effective governance. Additionally, he said that the United Nations recommends that member states undertook a census every decade. The MCE urged the committee members to work harder to ensure good result since bad census would no doubt result in a wrong allocation of resources in the municipality.