POPULATION SIZE, COMPOSITION AND AGE-SEX STRUCTURE

Population Size and Distribution

The total population of the District is 59,181 as against the Regional population of 2,118,252. In percentage terms, the population of the District represents 2.8%. In terms of sex composition, males constitute 49.2 percent whilst females form the remaining 50.8 percent. The District is predominantly rural with a percentage of 72.4 percent as against the regional rural population of 66.3 percent while the population in urban areas constitutes 27.6 percent in the District.

The urban settlements include Jasikan, Okadjakrom and Bodada. There is slight variation among children (0-14) years, adults (15-64) years and aged (65 years +) in terms of location of residence whilst 28.4 percent of those aged 14-64 years reside in urban areas. The respective figures for 0-14 years and 65 years are 26.9 percent and 24.5 percent reside in the rural areas. 

Age-Sex Structure

Age and sex are the most basic characteristics of a population. Age-sex structure indicates the number of males and females grouped in 5 year age cohort. Table 2.1 reveals that male population is slightly higher than that of the female population from age 0-4 years through to 15-19 years and then this reverses in favour of females from age 20-24 years onwards. There is a large proportion (37.8 percent) of children population (under 15 years) and youthful population (15-64 years) of about 55.5 percent with a smaller proportion of elderly persons (65 years and older) of about 6.7 percent.

It was also observed that rural communities in the District are inhabited by majority of the population across all age groups. Table 5 shows that rural localities have more dependent population (82.1%) than in the urban localities (75.4%).

The relatively high youthful population (15-39 years) of 36.6 percent in the District has an in-built momentum for rapid population growth. This has profound implications for development and quality of life for the people of the District.

There is relatively low dependency ratio of 80.2 in the District compared to the regional figure of 81.3.

Percentages

The age structure of the population in the District consists of a large number of children and a small number of elderly persons. With increasing age, the age-sex structure looks slightly thinner for the males than for females, indicating that the proportion of males reduces than that of females as the age increases.

As depicted in Figure 5, there is high proportion of the population aged 0-4 years (14.2%) and 5-9 years (7.8%) which indicates that the population in the District has a potential to grow for a considerable number of years. Also the nature of the population clearly indicates that, there is a heavy concentration of the population in the younger ages (below 15 years). This structure of population poses a challenge of high dependency ratio which usually leads to low savings and low investment; this could hinder local economic growth.

The Table further shows that the population per house is lower than that of both the Regional 5.2 and national of 7.1. The average household size of the Jasikan District has 4.2 which is the same as the Regional figure but lower than the national figure of 4.4.