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Author
Akram Kiyegga

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Census: Ugandans to answer 180 questions

What you need to know:

Babies born on or after May 10 will not be counted in the census, running for ten days from next Friday, during which enumerators will seek information on a household’s income, savings and assets as well as deaths and births.

Ugandans should prepare to answer as many as 178 questions when the long-awaited census exercise gets underway on Friday, next week. The day has already been designated a public holiday to enable working citizens, guests and refugees to be at their places of abode where enumerators will find them. These will include homes, lodges, hotels or apartments where interviewees would have spent the night of May 9, which the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) officially calls Census Night.

What this means is that persons who will be counted will be those in Uganda on or before May 9, which is the date that respondents should use when answering the question on where they spent the night. The place of abode for those in transit and the homeless will depend on where they spend that index night.

According to the March 2024 National Housing and Population Census (NHPC) Enumerators' Manual of Instructions and Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) User Guide, the guiding document for the enumeration, interviewees will, among other things, provide biographical, economic and social information that speak to their welfare. For instance, households will be asked about economic activities members are involved in, how much they earn and save, how much land and other resources they possess, and access to the government's poverty alleviation programmes such as Parish Development Model and Emyooga. Respondents will speak to their literacy rates by answering questions on levels of education attained by members of the household, who of them is out and school-going and where they study.

Enumerators will also count the number of mobile phone handsets and computers in a household, if any, and members' access to Internet that should help determine mobile phone and Internet penetration in the country. The census exercise will enable the government ascertain how far social services are from citizens, the means of transportation to the facilities and the quality of services offered.

There are 154 questions in the March 2024 NHPC Enumerators' Manual of Instructions and CAPI to be answered by households, institutions anu the homeless, accommodation facilities will respond to eight, communities are to answer half-a-dozen while a select group - bunched in six and 12, will be interviewed jointly in Focus Group Discussions. The questionnaires and respondents are generally clustered into five categories: households, institutions, homeless, accommodation facilities and communities. Households are defined in the census document as a person or group of persons who normally eat and live together regardless of their biological relationship. Institutional questionnaires on the other hand are designed to capture information on persons staying in an institutional arrangement such as schools, hospitals, and religious facilities. General information on a community in a parish will be gathered using community questionnaires. Despite the large number of questions, Ms Hellen Namirembe Nviiri, the director of Population and Social Statistics at Ubos, said that enumerators will be able to collect the required information within the census period, running from May 10-19.