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Leonard Ncube in Lupane

THE Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) has put in place all necessary measures to ensure every place and person is counted during the 2022 Population and Housing Census next month with all-terrain vehicles now available to get enumerators into the most remote areas.

Provinces like Matabeleland North are largely rural and communities sparsely located and difficult to reach because of poor road and mobile network coverage with parts of Binga along the Zambezi River sometimes left out of some national programmes because of inaccessibility.

Besides the terrain and poor roads, Matabeleland North is largely a mobile province because of many tourism resorts, meaning many people always move from one place to the other.

As the Population and Housing Census exercise gets underway from April 21-30, ZimStat, working with relevant Government departments in Matabeleland North, has made sure all-terrain vehicles will be used to reach every corner of the province.

Speaking at the 2022 Population and Housing Census Level 2 training workshop for Level 2 supervisors at Lupane State University yesterday, ZimStat director of statistical services Mrs Fadzayi Ndlovu, said enumerators would be drawn from people in specific areas so the agency uses their knowledge of the terrain to reach every citizen.

“As we do the 2022 Population and Housing Census, our recruitment is district and ward-based as we try to recruit as much as possible teachers or other people who reside within the enumeration areas. We are making sure we cover the rest of Matabeleland North using people who are already familiar with the terrain and places where we will get people that we are looking for,” said Mrs Ndlovu.

The trainees needed to give maximum attention and effort to the training as they would be supervisors of foot soldiers, and they should be ready to perform their role with diligence.

She urged them to shun cheating and maintain neutrality, high level of discipline and avoid false promises to respondents and guarantee respondents that data will be held confidentially.

There are 41 Level 1 supervisors, 453 Level 2 and there will be 2 126 Level 3 enumerators in the province.

Training for enumerators will be held from April 7-18.

The province has 2 076 enumeration areas and an additional 50 buffer areas to cater for eventualities.

Mrs Ndlovu said everybody within the country’s borders on the eve of April 20, travelling in buses, aeroplanes and any other means of transit until midnight on April 21 will be captured in the data.

Matabeleland North Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister, Richard Moyo, said efforts are being made to ensure no place or person is left uncounted.

“My office and ZimStat will need to make sure places like Binga, Lupane, Nkayi and other remote parts of Matabeleland North have 4-wheel drive vehicles to reach all areas and leave no one out,” said Minister Moyo.

He encouraged everyone in the province to avail themselves for counting.

This is important to direct Government on how many people are in the province and district so that resources are distributed informed by statistics rather than estimates.

Minister Moyo called for due diligence among those involved in the enumeration to give a true reflection of the province’s population.

“His Excellency President Mnangagwa when he launched the 50 days’ countdown to census night highlighted the importance of the census in informing Government decision making processes as it provides information of size, distribution and age structure of the population,” said Minister Moyo

He said the province will benefit from the census and be able to identify gaps and come up with intervention plans to improve livelihoods in line with set targets in the National Development Strategy 1.

He also reiterated the need for trainees to take the process seriously and said Government was ready to attend to all challenges.

ZimStat will this year deploy a high-tech data collection system, the computer-assisted personal interviewing , which transmits data collected by enumerators over the internet to a central mainframe in real-time. As a result, the census exercise will be completed between three to six months.

Previously, it took up to two years to collect and process data before producing the final census report.