By Dennis Peprah

Sunyani, (Bono), May 21, GNA – Dr Enock Katere, a lecturer at the College for Community Development (CCOD), a private technical university, has called on the government to invest and train public servants on dataset interpretation to improve the nation’s adaptive system for emergencies.

That would also foster effective inter-agency collaborations in tackling economic shocks, public health crises and climate threats, he stated.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Sunyani, Dr Katere, also an organisational development specialist, said, “we must reimagine our public sector as not just a service provider but as a learning, thinking, and adaptive system.”

He said public servants required knowledge to interpret data not only to improve adaptive systems, but also push information to flow across sectors, and thereby institutionalize decision making.

“We must foster a mind-set that values foresight over hindsight and systems that empower leaders to act on insight rather than assumption”, Dr Katere stated, saying as a developing nation “we can no longer afford to be data-rich and insight-poor”.

Dr Katere said the nation “doesn’t suffer from a shortage of information however what we lack is the capacity and sometimes the will to turn that information into timely, strategic decisions.”

He said the existing gap between data and action was more than just a technical oversight, saying that was a governance deficit that continued to cost the nation dearly.

Dr Katere stated: We live in the country where data is collected across every sector of the Ministries, Department, and Agencies which routinely produce reports, track performance indicators and submit monitoring forms.. “Yet when emergencies strike or when opportunities arise, our response is often delayed, misaligned, or overlay dependent on anecdotal evidence.”

He said the nation was “trapped in cycles of reactivity because the governance architecture we rely on is built for predictability and not for complexity”. “Take for example, our recurrent experience with urban flooding. Year after year, when the rains arrive, so do the disasters.

In many instances, we have satellite imagery, hydrological data, and years of rainfall patterns archived at NADMO, GMet, and urban planning offices, yet that insight is rarely synthesized into proactive urban flood management plans.” Dr Katere called for a shift from static data storage to dynamic decision intelligence approach that could model flood risks in real time, simulate various response scenarios, and guide resource allocation for disasters.

GNA

Edited by Dennis Peprah/Benjamin Mensah