2012 census preps on course

National Statistics Agen-cy is in the process of conducting field mapping and listing of households.
The national census will cost US$39 million. As part of the preparations, the population census Interministerial Census Technical Census Committee held its first meeting in Mutare last week.
The purpose of the Mutare meeting was to familiarise and introduce members to the aspects and processes of the census, create a platform for interactive discussion about carrying out a successful census and also discuss the various instruments to be used in the census.
Field teams have started visiting houses carrying out interviews in a preliminary exercise meant to prepare for the census.
Zimstart Population census manager, Mr Washington Mapeta, said the current process involved listing of 100 households constituting a unit called an Enumeration Area.
“The success of every census depends on field mapping.
“We have deployed teams in all the provinces for that and we will then draw maps for these areas and every inch of the country should be mapped, boundaries for any area should be known including its features,” said Mr Mapeta in a recent interview.
He said the objective of the field mapping was to ensure that every person was enumerated, and that no one should be missed or double counted.
“It also determines the location of the population in advance of the enumeration in order to make possible the recruitment, training and allocation of a sufficient number of enumerators to ensure that the exercise is done without omissions or duplications,” said Mr Mapeta.
The field mapping is envisaged to end in June 2012 before the actual counting commences in August.
Treasury, said Mr Mapeta, had so far released US$4 million for the field mapping. “We base our budgets on projected population, it costs US$2,50 to count one person, including field mapping,” he said.
Mr Mapeta said they would not count people in the diaspora as that would include visiting every place where Zimbabweans reside.
“We will not count people in the diaspora because doing so would be contrary to the method we are using.
“We are using a de-facto method as opposed to a de-jure method, that involves visiting people and counting them,” he said.
He said asking people if they had relatives or friends in the diaspora as part of the counting process would pose another challenge and cause some distortions.
“There are people whom you might think that they are still Zimbabweans when they are not.
“It would also be difficult to count the children they have from this side,’ he said.
“It would require us visiting them, which is expensive.
“Counting Zimbabweans abroad would also mean that we don’t count non Zimbabweans resident here.”
Officially opening the Mutare workshop recently, Zimstart board member Mr Simon Nyarota, said the meeting came at a time when significant strides were taken in the preparations for the 2012 census.
While the actual census will start in August 2012 there will be a pilot project commencing in August this year, which is a smaller version of the national census which is used in checking the operational preparedness of Zimstat in undertaking the actual population count.
Government departments, parastatals and the academic fraternity were well represented in the committee.
Mr Mapeta told the workshop that the committee only sits for about five years; two years before the census and for up to three years after the census; while the data collected from the census is being processed, until it is released.
This is the fourth population census that Zimbabwe has undertaken since the country’s independence in 1980. The first one was held in 1982, and two others were subsequently held at 10-year intervals.
The last census in 2002 put Zimbabwe’s population at 14 million.