The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has released the first-ever 2022 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) where 380,000 Ghanaians in the labour force between the ages of 15 years and above are triple burden.
According to GSS, the new report revealed that the workforce mainly made up of the youth in Ghana has issues of food insecurity, multidimensionally poor and also unemployed.
This finding was made known by the Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim during the launch of the quarterly annual reports to analyze food insecurity, poverty in a multisectoral approach and statistics on the labour force.
After three months of intensive data collections in all the 16 regions in the country, Prof. Annim revealed that the Savannah Region has the highest percent of the triple burdened rate of 8.2% which is more than twice the national average rate of 3.2%.
“What this means is that persons in the region have challenges of getting the three-square meals daily (food insecurity), poor in all aspect (multidimensional poor) and are also not employed,” Prof. Annim stated.
He said the report focused on multidimensional poverty, food insecurity and labour statistics from the first and second quarters. It revealed further that between the same period of 2022, food insecurity dropped by 7.0% points while multidimensional poverty also dropped by 2.6% and the unemployment rate increased by 0.5% points.
The AHIES report, he said is the first nationally representative high-frequency household panel survey in Ghana and has been conducted to obtain quarterly and annual data of household final consumption expenditure and a wide scope of demographic, economic, welfare variables and health status for research, policy and planning.
The findings also indicate that about 390,000 people between 15 years and above are unemployed in the first quarter and remained unemployed in the second quarter of 2022 while between the first and second quarters of the same year, about 445,000 people, 15 years and above outside the labour force joined the number of unemployed persons.
The new report indicates that about two-thirds of the employed population in Ghana are engaged in vulnerable employment with significant variation across urban areas of 56.4% and rural of 80%.
Prof. Annim said the report also highlighted gender inequality in the labour force indicating that the unadjusted gender pay gap in the first quarter is 37.3% with males earning a mean hourly pay of GH11.00 to that of GH6.9.00 for females.
Another highlight in the release indicated that 49.1% of persons in ghana are moderately food insecure, 12.3 are severely food insecure and 44.1% are multidimensionally poor and about 14 million people in Ghana do not currently have active health insurance coverage.
On his part, the chairman of the occasion and Senior Advisor at the office of the President, Professor Kwaku Appiah-Adu said all organizations need research findings to drive the developmental agenda of the country.
Prof. Appiah-Addo said the information obtained will support the government in the evidence-based decision and policy design of its programmes and projects for a more robust of ailing economy.
