Agricultural census empowers youth
Pauline Dikuelo | Wednesday February 4, 2015 11:18
The organisation’s manager of communication, documentation and dissemination, Lillian Setimela said the selected individuals would work with 117 more from the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and SB.
“About 53 of them are supervisors, 11 quality controllers and another 53 drivers. We tapped into our existing database of Tirelo Sechaba for available participants. The Tirelo Sechaba office and the Ministry of Youth Sports and Culture worked with us to identify these enumerators,” she said.
Data collection, which started in January this year, is expected to finish in December 2015. The exercise is divided into two phases. The first phase, which runs from January to September this year will focus on traditional holdings. The second and last phase will focus on commercial holdings.
Setimela added that field workers were trained on the use of data collection tools and how to conduct field work. “This is a year long project which represents an opportunity for Tirelo Sechaba participants to acquire life skills and be self-reliant.
Tirelo Sechaba participants will develop positive work ethics, such as commitment and dedication, punctuality and delivering on time,” she said. She added that in the long run Statistics Botswana and other stakeholders such as government departments and private sector companies involved in the business of data collection will have a pool trained and highly experienced enumerators. Data collection targets both traditional and commercial agriculture.
The traditional agricultural holdings are in rural areas, including urban villages, while the commercial agricultural holdings are on agricultural farms or ranches on freehold land, leasehold land and Tribal Grazing Policy Land on communal holdings land.
The census is conducted in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture to help achieve the ministry’s vision of ensuring food security and global competitiveness for agricultural products.
It also expected to help develop policies and programmes to improve the performance of the agricultural sector in the country.The first agricultural census was conducted in 1971, and focused only on livestock. Another agricultural census, which covered both crops and livestock, was carried out in 1982.
The second agricultural census was held in 1993, while the last one was done in 2004. All past agricultural censuses were conducted by the then Central Statistics Office in collaboration with the MOA and sometimes with technical assistance from Food Agricultural Organisation, as was the case in 1993.
The agricultural sector contributes less than three percent to the Gross Domestic Product primarily through beef exports. Although most farmers practice subsistence farming, agriculture can only supply food to only half the population, which is attributed to various factors like poor soil and eratic rainfall.