Teachers, inspectors to assist in census

SELECTED teachers and inspectors from schools around the country will assist the National Statistical Office with Census 2020 enumeration exercise in July.
This was confirmed during the signing of a memorandum of understanding between NSO, Department of Education and the Teaching Service Commission yesterday.
Acting National Statistician John Igitoi said Census 2020 was a massive exercise that would require a lot of resources because it was a mandatory head count.
“We will be doing a head count of every person starting from babies to the very old and those about to die,” Igitoi said.
“We are not bringing Papua New Guineans to a designated location like the national elections.
“We are going to places where they live so we need a lot of human resources for this important operation.”
The signing of the MoU yesterday to engage teachers and inspectors during the second term break was a step taken by NSO to ensure that there would be enough human resource required for the exercise.
“We also know that the government has limited resources in terms of funding and so we cannot dwell on the funding, we need to come up with some strategic action plans and this MOU is one of them,” Igitoi said.
Education secretary Uke Kombra said agreement was important for the department because they needed to know how many children were born every year so they could plan on how many schools and classrooms could be built and how many teachers to train.
“These are very critical information,” he said.
Kombra said information from the census would help his department work out statistics such as the country’s literacy rate.
“There are people who say that our literacy rate has gone up to 63 per cent.
“We’ve educating people since the 1950’s so the literacy rate should be higher than this but we will depend on the census statistics to give us formal information that we can use,” he said.
“We hope that results come back quickly because sometimes it takes a long time.
“We would like to see your preliminary results and the final results of the census.”