Didn’t we plan well enough for census?

On June 14 last year, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics reluctantly admitted that the planned 2023 National Census exercise would be postponed to a later, unspecified date. According to the Bureau, the extension of the census date was intended to allow it to acquire a sufficient number of tablets to facilitate a digital approach to the exercise. At this point, the Bureau, which was struggling with a financial shortfall in its preparations, had already announced that it would deploy 120,000 enumerators, each equipped with a tablet. All seemed to be going well until April 2, 2024, just a month ago, when the UBOS Executive Director Dr Chris Mukiza and his team returned to parliament to ask for Shs23.7 billion to pay taxes for the imported tablets needed to enable the census. By this time the government had already settled on May 10, 2024 as the start of the census. 

This prompted alarm bells about the extent of UBOS preparations for the census. Had the tablets been procured, tested, and found fully functional, some asked. Had the enumerators been recruited and trained on the said tablets? Had the related accessories been procured, and provided, to the enumerators in time for the census? Was the UBOS confident that the enumerators recruited would provide accurate, reliable and verifiable data that would meet the objectives of the exercise?

For effect, it has not helped that Dr Mukiza’s responses to these and many other queries do not exude confidence in the process. For instance, a week before the exercise, while dispatching consignments of tablets to upcountry districts, Dr Mukiza let it slip that some of the enumerators recruited had not come through the set processes. Asked about whether there was sufficient security for the enumerators, or accessories such as jackets, boots, umbrellas and caps, he indicated that there was no need, “…since they were Ugandans, already familiar with conditions in their home areas”.

The tablets and bags, and in some cases allowances, were finally handed to the enumerators on the night of May 9, 2024. But the speed of execution of the enumeration exercise has been anything but haphazard. And this has not stopped those posing the questions. If the UBOS came up with a 178-question list of pointers to be answered by each one of the 45 or so million Ugandans, how long will it take the 120,000 enumerators to reach everyone who was resident in the country on the night of May 9, 2024? Simple Mathematics indicates that if Uganda had 45 million people resident in Uganda on that night, each of the enumerators would have to reach 375 of them in 10 days, at a rate of about 38 per day!

But perhaps more critical, for those who had to endure a public holiday on May 10, 2024, in which they were not even enumerated, why did the UBOS not consider recruiting 1,200,000 enumerators, who would be able to reach four people in one day and be done with the process over one weekend?

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