Population census is carried out everywhere in the world except for countries that for whatever reasons are not able to conduct one successfully. I do not see how Kenya can fail to deliver on this historical activity.
If anything, Kenya has been doing the same from 1948 and all the rounds have been executed well. I want to believe that the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics should be able to deliver on this having planned well. The whole issue of coverage is in the planning. There are standard ways of ensuring this happens.
It is possible to cover everybody if there are structures put in place. For example, if you say you want to reach everybody, you start by answering the question where do I find people? You will find that you can get people in their homes, hotels, schools, hospitals, prisons and barracks and so on. You only need to come up with an appropriate strategy to make sure you get to count everybody.
That is all that needs to be done. I want to believe KNBS has worked along that line to ensure people in hotels on that night are covered. It is easy.
I am not worried and I don’t think Kenyans should be worried. The census will be delivered as has been done in the past. We are looking forward to getting this data. Universities will benefit from the process, and so will other sectors like agriculture. Census data is more reliable than survey data because it has no sampling error. It covers everybody. Surveys cover a small sample which is used to generalize.
The only problem of attaining 100 per cent coverage is the mechanics of reaching the goal. This is largely about how much resource one deploys. How do we ensure that people in the barracks are counted? Simple. Get someone from the barracks to be an enumerator. That is how other countries do it. I am not just talking about Kenya, but the world. Given that we have done this for six rounds, there is no reason to doubt the process.
The UoN Population Studies lecturer spoke with the Star
