KAMPALA, UGANDA: Uganda will next year in August conduct a national population and housing census, the Minister of ICT and National Guidance, Dr Chris Baryomunsi has announced.
While addressing journalists on Tuesday at the Uganda Media Centre in Kampala, Dr. Baryomunsi said the census’ major aim is to improve service delivery across the country.
The minister said government has already earmarked Shs330b for the exercise which will take place between August 24-25 2023.
“We received and approved a document from the Ministry of Finance on national housing and population census that is due to start next year. The census night has been fixed for August 24-25, 2023,” the minister said.
“The process is estimated to cost Shs330 billion, which government will mobilise in the two financial years; FY2022/2023 and 2023/2024. The census will enable the government to establish the number of houses and people and budget accordingly in terms of service delivery to various regions.”
Dr Baryomunsi said the population census will be done digitally and data uploaded directly to the central server in Kampala.
“This year, the Ministry of Finance through Uganda Bureau of Statistics(Ubos) shall be procuring IT devices such as tablets which will be used in the exercise because we are moving away from manual [system], and information shall be captured by the enumerators digitally and transmit the information to the servers,” he said.
The minister added that after the census, the smart gadgets will be used to carry out other studies such as agricultural census and administrative statistics, among others.
The Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) usually carries out census every 10 years, and with the last census having been held in 2014, the year 2022 had been earmarked.
Previous census have faced delays. There was a delay in 2002, then UBOS conduced the one of 2012 in August 2014. The Census 2014 was carried out under the theme “Counting for Planning and Improved Service Delivery” and the Census Reference Night was the Night of 27th August 2014
This was the 5th post-independence Census in Uganda.
The UN mid-year population for Uganda, for the financial year 2020/21, is said to be 47.1 million. However, the government of Uganda’s official population projection for the same period is 42.4 million, resulting in a 4.7 million difference.
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