By Mabinty M. Kamara
Despite the withdrawal of support towards the Mid-Term Housing and Population Census by the World Bank, Statistics Sierra Leone, the institution mandated to do headcounts in the country will move on with the process that will commence today, 10th December 2021 as recently proclaimed by President Julius Maada Bio.
A statement released by the Bank dated 8th December, states that it cannot continue to support the process because they believe certain action points agreed on with the institution and other partners to ensure credible and quality data were yet to be taken. Limited time for the execution of those actions points to the commencement date of the census was another concern raised.
“To that end, a roadmap laying out the final remaining steps, actions, and technical verifications required was prepared and multilaterally agreed between (Statistics SL, UNFPA, and the World Bank task team) during the first week of November,” the statement reads in part.
It added: “To date, while work on most action points is underway with some completed, several critical action points require further technical work to be satisfactorily addressed including evaluation of the pilot census, the field operation plan for the enumeration, and ensuring enumerators are adequately trained. Therefore, while our technical team remains available to provide continued supports, regretfully, we will be unable to provide further technical assistance nor disburse any further funds under IDA Grant No. D584-SL,to support the mid-term census following the announced inception of data collection on December 10, 2021.”
The census will not only be the first digital process to take place in Sierra Leone, but will also be the first mid-term exercise to be conducted in the country, which Statistics officials say is to correct errors detected in the last headcount of 2015. Sierra Leone until now had conducted a census every ten years.
However, the process has sparked several criticisms since President Bio first proclaimed it in July 2020 both from civil society groups and opposition parties.
The main opposition party, the All Peoples Congress stopped all their members and supporters from taking part in the process for reasons such as constitutional and, procedural issues, lack of preparedness, and technical deficiencies among others ,which according to them will affect the quality of data that will be generated from the census.
The Publicity Secretary for the APC party, Sidi Tunis told Politico that the reasons advanced by the World Bank for withdrawing its support from the process are the same issues that his party has been pointing at.
“Let us don’t forget that the president, one of the major reasons he proffers for going ahead with this census is to correct anomalies of the 2015 census and we have even picked up bigger anomalies associated with this. So you cannot correct anomalies with anomalies and that is why we have been calling for the suspension of the census until we are fully and adequately prepared as a nation to carry on with it,” he said.
But the Statistician-General Osman Sankoh says the process is going on as planned, noting that census is the responsibility of the government, supported by partners and other institutions that are interested to contribute.
“We are extremely grateful to the World Bank for the support and I was to state upfront that it was in 2018 that we started this discussion with the World Bank. And they saw the need for us to really conduct a mid-term census. And it should have been in 2020 had it not been for the COVID and so they were convinced that there is a justification to do the mid-term census because of what we presented to them, the anomalies that occurred in the 2015 census, that had to do with the coding of the localities,” he said, adding that about 60 percent of those enumerated areas do not have correct coding.
Other supporters of the census according to Statistics Sierra Leone are UNFPA, UNEACA, UNICEF, MRU, Chinese Embassy, and Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Malawi National Statistics, and the Ghana Statistical Service among others.
Copyright © Politico Online 10/12/21
