The Central Statics Agency, which is responsible for counting the national population and number of houses, has finished preparing for the fourth national census from April 7 to 28.
The Government of Ethiopia established a commission, led by Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen and members from nine regional states along with ministers to spearhead the operation.
The census was initially scheduled for November 2017. It was then postponed again to March 2018 due to public unrest and violence in the country. The continued unrest caused further postponement until the current date was scheduled.
CSA has prepared for the last couple of years and prioritized the use of technology to ensure quality timely results.
The CSA had previously revealed the purchase of close to 180,000 tablets from Chinese technology giants, Huawei and Lenovo, to effectively establish a meticulous data registration system, which will eventually avoid duplication and double counting during the data collection and registration process.
As the fourth PHC is fully digitized, the agency is closely working with INSA to protect against a possible cyber-attack, according to Saffi Gemedi Communication Director at the agency.
“Ethiopia will be the reference for other African country as most of them plan to conduct their national censes by 2020,” Collins Opiyo technical advisor at UNFPA told journalists.
In the census 85 questions are expected to be asked in one of five local languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Afaan Oromo, Somali, and Afar.
For this censes around two thousand enumerators, supervisors and technical advisers will participate.
Although the current FDRE Constitution dictates that the census be conducted every 10 years, Ethiopia did its second and third population and housing census in 1994 and 2007.
Following another controversy filled 2007 Census, the results announced to the House of Peoples’ Representatives (HPR) was contentious at best. One was the error in counting the population in Afar and Somali Regional States, which was later recounted. This particular error was, in fact, admitted by the commission at the time. The second was controversial because it potentially missed between 2 and e million members of the Amhara population. After finishing the data gathering, the result will be announced within six months according to Safi.