ADDIS ABABA — The Ethiopian Central Statics Agency disclosed that it has finalized more than 90 percent of the preparatory works to carry out the fourth national population and housing census in the beginning of March in this fiscal year.
Agency Vice Director General Aberash Tariku said yesterday that the Agency has allocated more than 3.5 billion Birr budget for all activities, out of which 1.3 billion Birr has been disbursed to regions. In addition to this, close to 180, 000 teachers, agricultural experts, and health extension workers have been recruited as data enumerators.
According to the Vice Director, the Agency has carried out upgrading of data center, providing manuals, provided training of trainers (ToT) for 1600 personnel in Hawassa and Addis Ababa. The trainees are set to train enumerators up on completion of the ToT. Census Data Analysis Task force Coordinator Tabit Ahmed on his part said the fourth population and Housing census differs from its predecessors in that it applies advanced digital technology.
In this regard, the Agency’s Senior Experts have prepared Census and Survey Processing System (CSPro) with technical assistance from US experts. The instrument (CSPro) helps to generate quality data. CSPro is a software package for capturing, editing, tabulating and disseminating data from the census. During the past three censuses, enumerators collected the census data manually which makes the census time taking and tiresome. He said.
To solve the problem, the agency has carried out two experiments and three pilots in order to adopt the new technology (CSPro) in Ethiopia for the fourth census, he noted. As to him, effective population and housing census is playing decisive role to forecast the demographic future of the population and related issues in the country. The first population and housing census in Ethiopia was carried out in 1983, it was learnt.
The Ethiopian Herald, March 16/2019
BY MESERET BEHAILU
