adminThe exercise will start at midnight on 17 August up to 18 August in the morning to cater for the homeless and those who would be travelling and it would continue up to 28 August.
In a telephone interview from Harare, Mr Mapeta said Zimstat in liaison with education directors from the 10 provinces in the country, was working on training programmes and beefing up enumeration teams.
“We already have teams that would conduct the census exercise from last year and we got some from provinces. We are now working on setting up teams at district level. Altogether we expect to have 40 000 enumerators,” said Mr Mapeta.
“Some are already on board. I cannot say we are looking for enumerators but we take the group that is there and train it. We engage our supervisors when there is a need to identify additional officers. Right now we already have teams that are undertaking training in all the provinces.”
Turning to financial support for the exercise, Mr Mapeta said Zimstat was satisfied with support from the Government.
“The whole exercise requires $37 million. We are not given all the money at once but the Government is giving us funding depending on our weekly budget proposal and so far everything is progressing well,” he said.
Last week Zimstat launched its second phase of the population census training programme in preparation for the national census data collection exercise.
The two-week training programme is a provincial level exercise targeting supervisors drawn from all the districts in the 10 provinces.
Matabeleland South deputy education director Mr John Jamela said teams were undergoing training in Plumtree.
He, however, could not be drawn to disclose the number of officers already being trained.
“As a province we have sent our people for training up to level two. They are training in Plumtree as we speak but I cannot give you the figures,” said Mr Jamela.
Last year Zimstat conducted a mapping exercise, which dealt with the delimitation of enumeration areas and agreed that for the purposes of effectiveness there should be one enumerator per enumeration area with between 80 and 120 households.
Previous ones were carried out in 1982, 1992 and the last being in 2002 where the country had a population of 12 million people compared with 10,4 million in 1992.
A population census is the process of collecting, compiling, evaluating, analysing and disseminating demographic, economic and social data pertaining to all persons in a country in a specified time.
derick.khumalo