By: Ilyasa Baa
With premium placed on data collection to make the government of Sierra Leone take informed decisions towards development, there is going to be a nationwide census to collect data of established businesses including those selling under umbrellas.
The cooperation of traders is expected to make the country develop a Universal Business Register which would be used to estimate the Gross Domestic Products (GDP).
“We are going to register every business except those owned by the government”, said the Director of National Account and Economic Statistics at Statistics Sierra Leone, Molima Andrew Ghebeh.
He said the survey will help government and Development Partners to take informed decisions on how to boost businesses in the country. He added that the survey was only conducted for urban areas adding that, before this time it was used to be for the whole country. He cajoled that anyone who refuses to partake will have him or herself to blame because that business won’t be in the Universal Business Register which is an important document.
He disclosed that Statistics Sierra Leone would train a total of seven hundred Enumerators and one hundred and seventy – five Supervisors to carry out the exercise. They will be trained in three batches and deployed on the ground to canvas traders with the two pages questionnaire business entities to fill in. However, the census will not cover peddlers who are not stationed at a particular place.