With the census year ending in a few days, Gambians have been asking what the fate of the 2023 housing and population census which was moved from April to November this year. In April this year, the Gambia Bureau of Statistics, GBoS, announced the census will be conducted in November which did not happen.
The Standard tried repeatedly to get comments from the Statistician General Nyakasi Sanyang who could not be reached on the phone and did not respond to our enquiries sent by text.
However, in October, Sanyang was quoted in an exclusive interview with The Alkamba Times as saying the census will now be held in 2024 because of the late disbursement of funds and logistics challenges in the wake of the resumption of school as they rely heavily on schools to conduct training for their data collectors and other field workers.
“It was in November that we wanted to conduct the Census as we indicated in our last press release, but we realized that it is not ideal in terms of conducting the activity. One reason why we couldn’t do it is that we rely on schools for our training. The schools are just resuming, and we cannot get the classrooms to do the training. Another reason is that this time around, we are doing the whole exercise digitally, which means every activity we will do will be based on technology using handset devices. At the moment, we have a consultant who is helping us to train our guys on how to use Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI), as well as integrating all our works into the digital platform, but this CAPI System is not ready yet,” the GBoS Statistician General explained to TAT.
He further disclosed that because GBoS has not completed and used its designed CAPI system, it is practically impossible to roll out a pilot run for this year’s census.
