Population data to be released on April 3

PROVISIONAL figures on the 2011 national population and housing census will be released on Tuesday, national statistician Joseph Aka said.
Prime Minister Peter O’Neill is expected to publicly release the figures at the Sir John Guise Stadium in Port Moresby.
The 22 provinces, including the two newly-created provinces of Jiwaka and Hela, will have their provisional figures released.
The provisional figures will include the country’s total, provincial, district and the LLG populations.
People have been invited to witness the launching which will feature dancing groups from different regions.
After 30 years, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville had full census coverage last year.
The last full coverage was in 1980.
The National Statistical Office has stood firm against public criticism of the census exercise.
The final census report will be released next year.
Aka said NSO had conformed to international statistical standards and methods in data collection.
He said all forms had undergone three phases of checks.
The first was for census unit reconciliation to identify all forms that had arrived from the provinces by workload enumeration areas against the 2010 census unit register.
He said the second phase was for labelling, using bar codes of all the identified workloads of enumeration areas.
He said the final check was to enter the census pad cover information of all identified enumeration areas from phase one and two.
Aka said the final check gave the total number of persons for each enumerated local level government, district, province and the country.
He said that included the number of households that had been enumerated for each LLG, district and province.