NSO extends census exercise in some areas

National Statistics Office (NSO) has extended the population and housing census in some areas whose people could not be reached for the exercise.

NSO commissioner Mercy Kanyuka said some areas were hard to reach whilst some people were not in their homes when the enumerators visited them but played down fears that this would have a negative impact on the overall results of the exercise.

“We have 99 per cent of the results so this will not affect the outcome of the exercise,” she said.

The exercise which run for three weeks officially ended on Monday but Kanyuka said in some areas, the exercise will continue for the whole week.

This follows concerns and an uproar in some areas in all the regions where enumerators failed to register people in their homes during the exercise which is undertaken every after 10 years.

Some people blamed enumerators whom they accused of being “too lazy” to visit all their designated areas.

But Kanyuka said in some areas, the enumerators started late to do their job because some traditional leaders quarreled over boundaries of their areas.

The NSO employed 20 000 enumerators for the 21-day exercise.

On the concerns that some enumerators have not been paid their allowances, Kanyuka said just over 1,000 enumerators are yet to get their allowances because they did not have bank accounts and used bank accounts of their relations or parents.

“We will be paying them very soon. We contacted them after banks refused to credit their accounts because the names we gave them and the bank account names were different,” she said.

She said preliminary results of the exercise will be known by December whilst the main results will be issued in April, 2019.

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