The Upper East Region, according to the latest Population and Housing Census by the Ghana Statistical Service, has a total of 565 PhD holders.
According to the GSS 2021 PHC the Greater Accra Region has the highest with a total of 11454 PhD holders as of 2021. Second is Ashanti Region with 5157, the Central region had 3788, while Northern Region also had 1663.
Reacting to the disaggregation by the GSS, a former Upper East Regional Minister and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Education Winneba (UEW), Professor Ephraim Avea Nsoh has opined that, all things being equal, there should be a direct link between the number of people with Ph.Ds within a defined space and the development in that area.
He said this when he spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show. Professor Avea Nsoh however admitted that there are some limitations.
“One of the major gaps in developing countries and for that matter, Ghana, and even worse in the Upper East Region is the absence of data; more broadly speaking, research. What it means is that a lot of decisions are made on the whims and caprices of policymakers, chiefs and others.”
“What it means is that we have a serious gap in terms of development. This is because we do not have a lot of research information that will guide us in our decision-making. There is nothing that will succeed without it being informed by data; what it is that it is about, what are the causes, and what is likely to be the impact, the result and everything.”
Even worse, according to Professor Avea Nsoh is the fact that political leaders and technocrats are not necessarily enthused about the use of data.
“Even if all of us were here [in the Upper East Region] doing research into Upper East related work, the other unfortunate thing is that the use of data and research [is not high]. Most of the time, our leadership and our technocrats are not data-friendly and research-friendly. We are just eager to write things without supporting data.”
“Even if we had all the research materials from all these doctors, it means that we should have been able to have a lot of data here and that they [politicians] should be using it and development would have been very fast.”
“Many of our leadership here are not interested in using data. They are interested in using their own sentiments and sometimes. There has been a lot of effort to ensure that there is a certain link between research and what happens in our real life but unfortunately, we are not picking up,” he said.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
