The Energy Center (TEC), KNUST in partnership with the Worldbank ESMAP has organized a training programme aimed at developing the capacity of its Fellows and Associates in Data Template Design and Entry using the Census and Survey Processing System (CSPro) Software, a tool developed by the US Census Bureau for entering, editing, tabulating and mapping census and survey data. The training programme which took place on 3rd and 4th August 2010 at the College of Engineering’s e-Classroom was facilitated by Dr Seth Ohemeng-Dapaah, a Statistician with the UN Millennium Villages Project and formed part of an ongoing collaboration between TEC and ESMAP to conduct a scoping study on Energy Access for the Urban Poor. 

In his opening remarks, Dr Ohemeng-Dapaah indicated that due to the limitations of other tools traditionally used for the capture and entry of survey data, there was the need to migrate to a more versatile world-class option to enhance the quality of the project’s output.

A partner organization of TEC in the Energy Access for the Urban Poor project, People’s Dialogue Ghana (PDG), also participated in the training as a staff capacity development programme.   Fellows and Junior Associates of TEC were grateful for the opportunity to acquire additional skills which would be useful in analyzing data that would be collected from the study communities and also in subsequent activities of The Energy Center. Dr Ohemeng-Dapaah also introduced other tools such as EpiData (EpiData Association) and Epi Info (from the World Health Organization).    

A similar training event has since been organized in Accra for the field enumerators for two of the study communities- Old Fadama in Accra and Amuidzor in Ashaiman.