Recognizing this, Ghana wants its new census data to be more accurate, comprehensive, and granular than in the past. In addition to switching to digital tablets, it’s using satellite imagery to make sure households in rural areas don’t go undiscovered and uncounted, and disaggregating the data it collects at the district level.
The government is now seriously committed to a “leave no one behind” ethic, which means counting every single person in the population. That includes people who are sometimes called “the invisible” — those who live in slums, who are homeless, or who are institutionalized. [...]
Sometimes called West Africa’s “golden child,” Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to cut its poverty rate in half, thereby achieving the first of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a list of eight targets that world leaders pledged to meet by 2015. [...]
That sounds impressive, but when researchers disaggregated the data they found that in some regions, over 70 percent of people were still below the poverty line, Seidu said. In two districts in a particularly poor region, it was as many as nine out of 10 people. [...]
One of the major critiques of the Millennium Development Goals was that some countries saw improved conditions for people who were just below the poverty line, but the extremely poor weren’t better off. So when the UN formulated a new list of targets in 2015, dubbed the Sustainable Development Goals, it emphasized the motto “leave no one behind” as a guiding principle. Those words have become a popular development slogan.
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