BY ATHLAI TATENDA MDZUNGAIRI
Government has released US$30 million of the US$98 million which was allocated for the 2022 national census programme, the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) said yesterday.
This was disclosed during an inter-ministerial census technical committee meeting in Kwekwe yesterday.
“The Ministry of Finance has been very supportive and US$30 million has been released to us,” ZimStat director-general Taguma Mahonde said.
“We are doing procurement of information technology equipment and accessories as we have introduced the use of tablets on collecting data, the numerators attire for them to be easily recognized. The other remaining balance is for allowances during numeration.”
He said ZimStat intends to use, for the first time in the history of the country, tablets as a collection tool instead of the paper questionnaire during the 2022 census.
“For the first time we have moved away from paper questionnaire, now our numerators will be using tablets to collect data from households and by the end of each day data collected should be synchronized to our server. Also the introduction of tablets will assist our field staff not to travel long distances to submit data at our headquarters in Harare as it was a massive exercise,” Mahonde said.
“In November this year, the pilot project will be commenced which will be used in checking the operation preparedness of Zimstat in undertaking the actual population counting by putting census instruments to test.”
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Government has also set up a national census committee which is chaired by Finance minister Mthuli Ncube.
This will be Zimbabwe’s fifth population census since independence in 1980. The first one was held in 1982.
Mahonde said ZimStat was in the process of training numerators, field mapping and listing households around the country ahead of the 2022 national census.
The meeting was to prepare for the upcoming training sessions which will be conducted at three different levels starting with training of trainers, followed by supervisors and lastly the numerators.
Mahonde said his organisation had covered one province and 32 districts doing field mapping to divide the country into enumeration areas.
The field mapping is envisaged to end on January 21, 2022 before the actual counting commences on April 21.
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