Ahead of the 2023 census, the National Population Commission (NPC) has said it is ready to deploy technology that would make the exercise smooth and accurate.
For this reason, it said it would train its staff adequately on the usage of the Personal Device Assistant devices to avoid hitches during the exercise, adding that the devices were being configured for the exercise.
Nigeria had its last census in 2006 and failed to conduct the next exercise in 2016.
Punch reports that the census slated for 29 March to 2 April 2023 would be conducted with the aid of technology, said to be the first in the country’s history.
Following reservations in some quarters over the safe deployment of technology, especially being the first time such would be adopted for the exercise in the country, the commission’s spokesperson, Isiaka Yahaya, said in an interview on Friday that the NPC was fully prepared for the exercise.
He stated: “The National Population Commission is set to deploy technology for the conduct of the 2023 census and we are making a lot of progress. The main technological component of the census is the deployment of the Personal Digital Assistant devices. This is the tool that will be used for the collation of data instead of the paper that we used.
“In this regard, we have received a substantial number of the PDAs we require for the census and right now, those PDA devices are being configured. We are also making efforts to see how other sister agencies also use PDAs and how they can support us by loaning us some of the PDAs temporarily. We are also making efforts to get some of the African countries who have conducted digital census to also use their equipment on a short-term basis.
“So generally, I will say that we are prepared to deploy technology and we are confident that the technology that we are going to deploy will not only ensure the smooth conduct of the census but also give us accurate and reliable data”.
He noted that given the technicality of the devices, training for those who would handle the machines were ongoing.
He added: “What we learnt is that we need to train and retrain our staff and ensure that they have the practical experience to enable them to master the use of the technology. We are spending about 12 days training our enumerators so that we do not have the challenges you spoke about”.
