Census shopping list goes to NEC

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
THE final shopping list for all items required for the National Population Census in June went before Cabinet yesterday, National Statistician John Aseavu Igitoi has said.
Igitoi said his team had submitted to National Executive Council for the procurement of all items necessary for the census now just 12 weeks away.
These items included 22,000 tablets to be used during the counting, printing of vast amounts of material, stationery and merchandise such as apparel for census workers.
In all, between K25 million and K30 million worth of procurement needs to be done almost immediately for preparatory work to be completed. Major procurement services such as logistics and allowances are separate.
Igitoi said he was 90 per cent certain the system is set to go. But the items have to be bought almost immediately and distributed.
“The only thing that I am worried about is procurement,” Igitoi said.
“It must be done this week because it will take up to six weeks to distribute all the materials to all locations. We have only 12 weeks.”
Coordination and execution of this massive undertaking is also daunting, he said. “It will be a logistics nightmare.
“There will be 25,000 people to coordinate across the country.”
Igitoi has called on all provincial and local level governments to cooperate as the outcome of a successful count will be beneficial to all for planning and allocation of resources in future.
“A provincial census coordinator has been appointed in each province with two in Morobe because of its size.”
Igitoi has proposed that government systems at all levels, especially at the sub-national level, should dedicate a week as Census Week to concentrate fully on census work. This would be the enumeration week from June 16.
Igitoi expected about K50 million to be released by the end of this month and another K50 million by May’s end for census work.
Census reference day was set on June 16, which is where every person was supposed to have slept at. The next day, June 17, was when counting would happen.
Enumerators with tablets would key in all the relevant information. When the enter key is pressed, all information would immediately be uplinked to Cloud (so that even if the tablet is stolen, the information is safe).
The tablets were trialed during the social demographic and economic survey in 2022 across the country and the accuracy was 96 per cent with the results coming out in three months, saving a lot of time from previous experiences.
Igitoi is confident this success rate would be repeated during the census proper in June.