NAIROBI—The government will recruit over 164,000 Kenyans to lead this year’s national population and housing census to be done this August, The national broadcaster reports.
The job advertisement is set to be done from next week across all platforms.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Nyeri County Kenya Population and Housing Census committee, a Human Resource Officer with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Pauline Waweru said apart from the core census personnel, the government will also hire albeit on temporary basis terms tens of hundreds of village elders and coordinators to assist in the exercise.
“The government will temporarily employ 135,000 enumerators, 27,000 content supervisors and 2,700 Information and Technology supervisors whose short listing and interviewing is expected to run from June 28 to 18th July this year,” Pauline said.
“Tens of security officers will also be deployed to ensure that the census is conducted in a secure environment”, Waweru added.
Ms. Waweru said unlike 2009 population census which was paper based, this year’s exercise will see the deployment of mobile based technology in data collection in a bid to ensure that the final figures are accurate.
Already said the official, two local universities namely Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Moi University have already been contracted to assemble the tablets that will be used during the census.
The use of information technology in this year’s census which will be conducted on the night of August 24th and 25th is expected to eliminate chances of manipulation of results and at the same time ensure that the data collected is accurate in order to allow the government to plan for the country’s development agenda.
The recently concluded cartographic mapping of the enumeration areas which involved the listing of households and number of members will be pivotal as it will be used to benchmark the results before they are finally released.
