The forthcoming census will last about one week

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

14 July 2019

So; we are going to spend Sh18.5 billion in the forthcoming census to count about 50 million people. That is Sh360 per person. Is that too much? Lets’ find out.

The cencus will be conducted by 135,000 enumerators; 27,000 supervisors and 2,700 ICT supervisors. That’s a total of 165,000 field officers.

The details of the wages of all these officers were published in the advertisements for those jobs. The 135,000 enumerators will be paid Sh1,500 per day and they will be engaged for a total of 16 days. Therefore, their total wage bill will be Sh3.24B

The 27,000 content supervisors will get Sh2,500 daily for 23 days. Their total payment comes to about Sh1.55B.

The 2,700 ICT supervisors will be engaged for 30 days and earn Sh3,000 daily. This comes to a total of Sh243 million.

Thus, the total wage bill for the census comes to slightly over Sh5 billion. But salaries are not the only expense. All these field officers will each get a computer tablet for data collection.

The tablets are being acquired from Moi and Jomo Kenyatta universities at a price of about Sh15,000 each. The total cost of 164,700 gadgets is Sh2.47B.

Putting these figures together brings the total so fat to about Sh7.47B. This is 41 per cent of the budgeted cost of Sh18.5B…. I have not seen the breakdown of how the remaining Sh11B will be spent.

Nevertheless; we can still check whether some other numbers add up. It is quite clear that each of the 27,000 content supervisors will be put in charge of five enumerators and each of the 2,700 ICT supervisors will handle 10 content supervisors; that is, a total of 60 devices.

According to KNBS, the enumeration process is expected to last about 30 to 45 minutes per household. Thus, in a 12-hour shift (from 6pm to 6am), one enumerator will visit about 16 to 24 houses – that’s an average of 20 in one night.

Each enumerator will be assigned about 100 households so, they will need about five days to complete the job. However, in the rural areas where houses are far apart the work will take much longer due to time spent walking from house to house.

I believe that this has been taken into consideration since KNBS carried out two test runs of the census. If I was asked, I would have suggested the use of motorcycles in the rural areas.

What is clear is that on the first night of the census, only about 20 per cent of people will have been counted. But that will not mean that the exercise will have failed: NO! It is planned to run for about a week.

Finally, I have heard people saying that developed countries don’t do censuses. This is simply not true! The USA is scheduled to have one in 2020 and the UK will follow in 2021. Nearly all countries of the world have a census every ten years. It is only failed states without a government that don’t hold a census!