Census data ‘unfit for purpose

DEMOGRAPHY EXPERTS: HIGHEST UNDERCOUNT’ RECORDED AND UNSUITABLE FOR PLANNING

Doing the count during Covid in 2022 complicated operations.

Data compiled in South Africa's Census 2022 is "unfit for purpose" and should only be used with "extreme caution in planning and resource allocation until thorough investigations" are carried out by Statistics SA, two leading demographic researchers say.

In an article in The Conversation, Tom Moultrie, professor of demography at the University of Cape Town, and Rob Dorrington, professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town, described Census 2022 as setting "an undesirable record - the highest "undercount" on a national survey yet recorded by the United Nations Population Division.

"The reported undercount of 31% is some 10 percentage points higher than the previous highest notified undercount [in Comoros in 2017]."

Although the 2022 results, released in October last year, were adjusted for the undercount, "it means the results are more estimates than counts, producing a number of anomalies in the census data. These call their usefulness into question", the researchers wrote.

Among the factors contributing to the undercount were:

►Attempting to run a census in the middle of the Covid pandemic's complicated operations. "This decision appears to have been forced by the national Treasury's refusal to allow the budget for the census to be held over to the next fiscal year."

►Delays in recruiting and training field staff to conduct in-person data collection.