Census a tool for development

Census 2001, starting next week in South Africa, will not only be about counting the numbers of citizens but it will also be an important tool for the government, NGOs and foreign donors to plan proper development strategies, Motale Phirwa, National Census Manager at Statistics South Africa told IRIN on Tuesday. "Accurate statistics will be invaluable for facilitating informed policy decisions as well as monitoring implementation," Phirwa said.

In South Africa 71 percent of children walk to school and 51 percent of them walk for an hour to get to school. This emerged in the coastal city of Durban at a media launch of Census 2001 on Monday, the second national census since democracy in 1994. The 2001 census will take place from 10-31 October. The last census was held in 1996 and it showed that the country had a total population of 40.6 million people.

Phirwa said 85,000 representatives of Statistics South Africa would be spread out across the cities, townships and rural areas of the country. "We're confident we'll get to everybody, we've recruited and trained enough staff and they will have better maps and more resources than before, ensuring all households are covered," he said. Phirwa added that the information would be collected by interview, so that it didn't matter whether resopndents were literate or not.

Statistics South Africa said the country had been divided into a mosaic of 81,000 units or enumeration areas by applying digital mapping technology to identify and isolate areas with 100 to 150 dwellings. Enumeration areas include houses, flats, townhouses, farms and hostels.

The first census of the Union of South Africa was taken in 1911, one year after its formation. Several enumerations occurred after that, but the black African population was not accurately counted in any of them. In 1950, when apartheid legislation officially restricted black peoples to approximately 13 percent of the land, the government declared that a national census would be taken at the beginning of each decade.

After that, Africans were gradually assigned to live in these homelands, then called Bantustans. As the first four homelands were granted nominal independence in the 1970s and the early 1980s, their residents and others assigned to live there were excluded from the official census of South Africa.

Another problem with census measurements was that many black South Africans lived in informal settlements, or "squatter camps," close to cities where they worked or hoped to work, and squatters were often omitted from census counts. In addition, although all citizens were legally required to register births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, many people - especially urban blacks - avoided doing so, in part because of the stringency and complexity of the laws governing legal residency.

According to Phirwa, "The survey carried out in 1996 was the first accurate census of South Africa." Critics of that study said it did not reflect the millions of illegal immigrants thought to be residing in the country. Statistics South Africa said that the 2001 census would include questions on country of origin and the results would be compared with Home Affairs figures on legal entry into the country. "That will give us a rough idea of how many reside here without papers," Phirwa said.

Similar population surveys are due to be carried out by all 14 Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries based on core questions in Census 2001. "The questions we're asking are not from Statistics South Africa, they emerged from SADC workshops and the plan is for each member country to do the same kind of survey as South Africa, providing much-needed statistical data on the whole region," Phirwa added.