Population census encounters problems
Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Tuesday March 29, 2022 06:00
Census enumerators have recently complained that their allowances were meagre when compared to temporary employed taxi drivers who earn much more.
Another issue they are complaining about is that they work overtime and even during weekends.
In her briefing to Parliament recently, Serame admitted to the challenges.
“Mr Speaker, we experienced several challenges at the beginning of the census. These are data collection system configuration, shortage of enumerators and vehicles, delayed delivery of supervisor and enumerator uniform and other support materials, as well as security issues for enumerators. The recruitment of trainee enumerators for all the districts had to be raised by 20% to be kept as a pool of reserves for replenishment in case of dropout during enumeration,” she said.
“Assessing the situation after administering the selection test revealed serious shortfalls in Kweneng East (191) and Gaborone (37) with 10 trained surplus enumerators in Kweneng West were deployed in Kweneng East.” She said currently, the plan is to dispatch reserves from Ramotswa (20) and Kgatleng (17) to Gaborone to close the deficit.
A plan to address the shortages in Kweneng East has been devised through which reserve enumerators from districts will be deployed. Serame said the distribution of the reserve pool is based on best performance (those who passed the test) in various districts.
The minister also told Parliament that there was a delay in delivering the key equipment needed by supervisors and enumerators, and some received it the day before the enumeration commencement date.
Furthermore, she said as these are important tools for identification and security, enumeration in some areas had to wait until they were received. On the issue of transport shortage, Serame said the transport preparatory activities for the census required 152 vehicles for the Statistics Botswana team and 1,905 vehicles for the districts. She said currently, the shortfall of 641 is being addressed.
In addition, she said transport arrangements for the enumeration exercise is coordinated by District Commissioners (DCs) for their respective districts for transportation of enumerators, supervisors as well as DCOs and District CITOs deployed at the district level.
She said the causes of transport challenges were many including the fact that the umber of vehicles required has increased significantly than in previous censuses mainly due to the increase in enumeration areas in the country from 5,331 in 2011 to 6,774.
The other factor was the deployment of technology against paper-based method which increased additional cadre of human resources, being, the Census Information Technology Officers (CITO) required to support enumerators in the use of tablets. The other challenge was that the number of vehicles sourced from both the Central Transport Organisation (CTO) and government departments was lower than expected primarily because most of the fleet required major repairs.