By Mabinty M. Kamara
As criticism surrounds the proposed Mid Term Censors, the Statistician General and CEO of Statistics Sierra Leone, Professor Osman Sankoh, has explained the relevance of the Censors to Sierra Leoneans.
Speaking at the Ministry of Information and Communication's weekly press briefing on Thursday, 13th August, Professor Sankoh said the Mid Term Population and Housing Census, which has been scheduled to start on the 4th of December this year, seeks to ensure proper allocation of resources for the implementation of the Medium Term National Development Plan.
The Statistician General said that President Julius Maada Bio approved the Census as was advised because Statistics Sierra Leone could not provide accurate population data for Type Three localities, amounting to 59% nationwide.
He noted that advanced technological tools such as the computer assisted data collection software will be used in the conduct of the Mid-Term Censors in order for them to do a proper job and correct the anomalies that occurred in the last census.
He further assured that the advanced tools to be used will aid the job to be executed quickly and accurately and will also completely eliminate any possibility of data falsification as was the case in the past censors.
He added that the statistical agency has experts in various fields that will get the work done correctly this time round.
He stated that other countries like Kenya have used the system and it worked for them which is why they are keen to replicate it in Sierra Leone.
Prof. Sankoh therefore called on all Sierra Leoneans to be involved in the process by making sure that they are counted and ensuring that everything is done appropriately. He noted that his institution was currently engaged in massive sensitization for people to know that they should stay at their various locations to be counted.
The exercise is expected to last for two weeks.
Samuel Ansumana, Director of Communication at Statistics Sierra Leone, told Politico that a locality or enumeration area in statistical terms is any known settlement or place that has a distinct name, noting that there are three types of such localities or enumeration areas in conducting census. Type one, he explained, has exactly between 80 to 120 households, whiles type two can be found in big towns and cities in which a single area can have up to 80 to 120 households in multitude.
"For type three, it those not have enough households that can amount to 80 to120. Say for example in small towns, which have about 20 houses. So to get an enumeration area from that, you have to combine several of those small towns to get one enumeration area. At times it could be up to five towns," he said, noting that that was some of the gray areas of the last census.
"We didn't get that correctly. There were data coding issues for all of those. And they represent 59% of the country. So that is the primary reason we proposed a mid-term census," he said.
Since the announcement by President Bio of the plan to conduct the census, there have been expressions of concerns about the intentions and relevance of the exercise. The opposition All People’s Congress (APC) said the move will be illegal. The civil society coalition National Elections Watch (NEW) raised questions about the relevance of the center and the intention of the government.
NEW said with the ongoing global COVID -19 pandemic, it was prudent for the government to focus its attention on its response effort to the pandemic than conducting a census.
"NEW is concerned with the prioritisation of this process now at a time when Covid-19 measures should be occupying the whole planning machinery and resources spent in that direction," the organization said in a press statement dated 29th July.
"NEW calls on government to use the time between now and the launch in December of this exercise to clarify to the citizenry the justification and methodology that will be used this time around so that the people can appreciate the shift, scope and approach. If this process is transparent and open to accommodating technical contributions that add value, its results will leave limited room for questions and contestations, especially those aspects dealing with governance matters," it added.
Censuses in Sierra Leone are normally conducted once every 10 years. However, according to law, it could be conducted any time as deemed fit by the President.
The last census was conducted in 2015, just five years apart from the proposed census.
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