But the Ministry of Youth and Sports has expressed discontent at how the GSS arrived at the figure.

Speaking at a consultative forum to establish the Sports Fund, the representative of the Ghana Statistical Services, Asuo Afram, who was brought in to quantify the contribution of sports to the country’s GDP, shocked the audience when he revealed that his department estimates the contribution of sports at 1.4%.

“If you take sports, we count sports under recreation and recreation contributes around 3.7% to the GDP.

And under recreation, we have estimated that sports contributes about 1.4% of the 3.7% that recreation contributes,” he said.

Pressed on how the GSS arrived at the estimate, Afram revealed that, among other things, the GSS takes into consideration the budgetary allocation for sports as basis for arriving at their figure.

His response drew fire from the Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports who is the Chairman of the National Sports Fund Committee who said his ministry will look into investing in an independent research institution to properly quantify the contribution of sports to the GDP.

“I think we can all see that this estimation of the contribution to sports is not scientific. Going forward, I think we need an independent ministry-sponsored scientific research into sports’ contribution to the GDP so that we can have verifiable scientific data to work with,” he said.

The Sports Fund Consultative Forum is aimed at building a proper framework towards the establishment of a sports fund that will help solve the country’s chronic financial deficit in the sports sector.

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By: Fentuo Tahiru/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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