From Fred Itua, Abuja
Executive chairman, National Population Commission (NPC), Nasir Isa Kwarra, has expressed concerns over insecurity on next year’s conduct of the national population census.
Kwarra who spoke in Abuja, yesterday, at a media conference on Trial Post Enumeration Survey (PES), however, expressed optimistic that ongoing security challenges would be effectively addressed by security agents to allow smooth conduct of the census.
“There are security challenges, but we’re working with security agents in addressing them. We can now go to places we couldn’t go before because of insecurity,” he said.
Speaking on the exercise, he said PES is a statistically representative survey that the NPC would use to check the accuracy of the trial census conducted in July 2022.
“The PES will allow the commission to determine how many people were missed, included by mistake, or counted in the wrong place. The conduct of the Trial PES is an integral part of the preparatory activities for the conduct of a successful census in 2023. The commission is placing premium importance on this exercise. As you know, a population census is the official enumeration of all persons in a country at a specific time. This encompasses the collection, compilation, evaluation, analysis, publication and dissemination of demographic, social and economic statistics relating to the population,” he said.
Kwarra said the PES has been designed to redress these possible errors in the census process.
“The results of the comparison are mainly used to measure coverage and content error in the context of the census. This Trial PES exercise is in line with the United Nations Principles and recommendations for population and housing censuses. It gives credibility to the census results and engenders confidence and acceptability of the census by data users.
“The objectives of this Trial PES are to measure coverage error due to either under-coverage or over-coverage of persons and in some cases households/housing units in the trial census. To determine content errors through measuring levels of agreement in responses to questions on selected characteristics, such as sex, age, marital status, relationship to reference person or head of household.”