Housing, population census everyone’s business: Official

THE National Housing and Population Census is everyone’s business and not solely the National Statistics Office’s (NSO) because it was the lead agency to facilitate the collection of data, an official says.
Census project director Hajily Kele said all citizens had a duty to participate in the census, especially in terms of awareness and promoting it.
“It is not something for NSO officers only, but for all of us to know and understand the importance of it,” she said.
Kele said they done all the paper work such as questionnaires and field materials, however, the main activity this month onwards would be the recruitment of people to participate in the structural listings, training and the actual counting.
She told The National that the people to be targeted to help carry out census work needed to be qualified and who had at least some experience in surveys and census.
“That will be easy for them to understand our content to do the job,” she said.
Kele said the NSO could only provide the criteria and guidelines so that the right people were selected for the job.
“It’s important that the census quality is maintained in the whole process,” she said.
She said because the census was an extensive job, they needed to engage more qualified and experienced people.
Kele said 15 provinces had signed the agreement but others were yet to sign and that really depended on each provinces as the NSO was only the facilitating and coordinating agency.
She said provinces needed to support the census with logistics and in other ways to ensure the work was done properly.