Making sense of the census
numbers
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
30 August 2009
Last week I promised to work out the economic value of the time wasted by
Nairobians in traffic jams. Please bear with me; I will get back to that
problem next week. For now, there is something a little more urgent..
The National Population and Housing census was the biggest story of the
week. 130,000 enumerators under the guidance of 15,000 supervisors were
allocated seven billion shillings to count approximately 35 million
Kenyans in 20 hours. The logistics of the exercise are mind boggling.
Still, we can try and make some sense of the numbers.
First of all, many have questioned the logic of spending sh7 billion at a
time when 10 million people are starving and there is even not enough
water or electricity. My concern about the cost, however, is a little
different: sh7b to enumerate 35 million people means that we are pending
sh200 to count each person! That’s rather costly, isn’t it?
My next worry is whether there were enough enumerators to complete the
exercise within the time allocated. The census was initially scheduled
to run from 6pm to 10pm on the 24th of August and then from
6am to 10pm on the 25th. That makes a total of 20 hours.
Therefore, to get to all the 35 million Kenyans, the census should have
registered 1.75 million people every hour. Each of the 130,000
enumerators should then have enlisted about 14 people per hour.
However, the enumerators were moving in pairs, thus each team of two
should have listed about 28 people every hour. That is, they had to
spend at most two minutes with each person in order to complete the
exercise – and that does not include the time required to travel from
one house to the next.
In reality, the enumerators spent anywhere between five and 25 minute in
each house. That’s and average of about 15min. Assuming an average of
five people per house, it turns out that they spent about three minutes
with each person.
To that, we can add another 2 minutes per person to account for the
travel time required `to walk from house to house. That makes a total
five minutes for every person enumerated. It is not surprising, then,
that by 10pm on 25th August, the census had not been
completed – only about half the people had been enumerated. Indeed, even
my house had not been visited by that time.
So how many enumerators could have done the job within the 20-hour limit?
Counting at five minutes per person means that every hour, each
enumerator listed about 12 people, or 240 in the 20-hour limit.
If each enumerator could only reach 240 people, and there were about 35
million to be enlisted, then at least 145,000 teams (pairs) were needed.
That is over 300,000 enumerators and supervisors. Mind boggling, isn’t
it? But that’s not all.
Since the major cost of the exercise was compensation for the staff, such
a number would have pushed the cost to almost sh14 billion, or sh400 to
count each person!
Now before anyone criticises me for waiting too late to write this, I
must mention that I had applied to participate in the census but
presumably I was deemed unqualified – I didn’t even get to the interview
stage! Had I been accepted, I would have pointed out these issues to the
organisers in good time.
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