NSA spends N$ 137m on pre-census activities

Tujoromajo Kasuto

The Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) has spent around N$ 137 million to complete the pre census activities.

In terms of the initial budget of N$ 1.1 billion, NSA Statistician General and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Alex Shimuafeni, says the pre-census activities for the Fiscal Year 2017-2021 were estimated at N$ 159 million for activities such as the development of the census questionnaire, the development of the census electronic tool (Computer Aided Personal Interviewer or CAPI application).

Furthermore, for the acquisition of census equipment, the census mapping project, the procurement of satellite images for the mapping project, the development of the Mapping data collection tool, and the development of the Census data collection tool. For the Financial Year of 2022-2023, the main enumeration was initially estimated to cost NSA N$ 950 million, where the 11 500 staff will be recruited, over 2 400 vehicles to be hired, and 11 500 tablets to be purchased for the use of data collection during the census.

Although the main enumeration (during 2022-2023) was estimated to be N$950 million, Shimuafeni notes that, “NSA was able to adopt measures that will further reduce this budget to about N$606 million.”

The CEO says that “currently indications are that the NSA will be allocated about N$500 million to the main enumeration phase for the 2022-2023 Financial Year. For the post-census phase in the Financial Year 2023-2025, the budget is slightly above N$ 12 million, which is allocated to census data cleaning, processing, main report and thematic reports production.”

Based on statistics from the NSA, it has received N$ 209.7 million (N$ 179.4 million from Government via National Planning Commission (NPC) and N$ 30.3 million from other Government institutions) towards the census over two financial years covering pre-enumeration activities.

The development budget ceiling to carry out the main census in the 2022-2023 Financial Year as communicated by the NPC currently stands at N$ 500 million, reduced from N$ 606, 9 million as earlier communicated in the previous Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which represents 18% reduction in the development budget.

Shimuafeni says the N$ 500 million will cover the main census enumeration, and the largest allocation is towards the required workforce and transportation and the budget ceiling for post enumeration activities planned for 2023-2024 stands at N$ 2 million.

To make up for the shortfall, the NSA held a resource mobilisation conference last February and received over N$ 40 million pledges, both cash and in kind, from various Government Offices, Ministries and Agencies as well as the private sector.

The N$ 30 million cash contribution was mostly earmarked to produce a national housing database and the acquisition of the Government wide satellite images license to support census mapping data collection, while most of the in-kind pledges was towards venues, staff, internet services and a few Government vehicles.

NSA also has announced that they will be recruiting 11 500 enumerators, whilst having employed 783 last year already for the 2021 Population and Housing Census that is slated for this y August after it was postponed last year due to competing priorities such as the COVID-19 budget prioritisation.

Namibia will for the first time conduct a spatially enabled and digital census enumeration and the 11 500 unemployed persons will be trained and equipped with the knowledge and ability to undertake a census statistical collection.

 

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