May 2024 Census: Definition, Justification, and What We Know So Far

Uganda’s eleventh population and housing ten-day-census since the country’s attainment of independence, gets underway effective the night of May 9.

This upcoming census round is the third for the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) to hold following those of 2002 and 2014. Since 2014 when Uganda last held its census, the country had fallen behind in as far as holding this exercise is concerned which is supposed to be held every after a period of six years.

Uganda’s leader, Gen President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, on December 12th last year, launched the program at Kololo Independence grounds with a lot of pomp and fanfare from members of his cabinet, government, different arms of government, global diplomatic corps plus Uganda’s government’s concerned agencies.

The man principally in charge of the census, Dr. Chris Mukiza, and the chairman of Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), Dr. Albert Byamugisha loomed large as their boss, Gen Yoweri Kaguta Museveni inaugurated the exercise.

By way of a simple definition, a national census is the counting of people in a given location within a given geographical or territorial setting referred to as a country. 

The main purpose of carrying out a population census is for the government to know the exact number of people residing within a given country, where they are located exactly, what their needs are and how they access the public services, and from where.

The overriding idea is to enable the government of a given country to plan better for its people since no meaningful planning can be executed by the government without knowing first how big the population, what it’s planning for and what its exact needs are.

What we know so far

More than 330 billion Ugandan shillings have since been set aside under the auspices of President Gen Museveni to facilitate the successful completion of the exercise.

The budget is unprecedented considering that for the first time ever in Uganda’s independence history, Gen Museveni’s government is set to cover ninety-eight percent of the cost of the census, leaving merely about 12 billion Ugandan shillings to be met by our international development partners.

137 billion shillings out of the overall census budget, has since been set aside for purposes of digitalization of  the system of enumeration and proper tallying of the results, ensuring for the first time in Uganda’s history that the exercise’s provisional results will be out in merely less than a month (June) after the completion of the exercise with the final results projected to be out in December 2024, underscoring the wisdom in moving away from the manual or paper-based census.

Prior to the digitization of the system, Uganda would only be able to release the final results of the census between two to three years after the completion of the exercise itself.

Counting Jobs, Building Futures

The absence of the results of the census over several years indicating the development milestones Uganda has attained over several years under his leadership is one of the factors which led the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund previously, as per Gen Museveni, to erroneously assert that Uganda was yet to attain the middle-income status.

Already much of the internet-powered enumeration and census results-tallying gadgets have already been procured by the Uganda Bureau of Standards (UBOS), potentially promising a very successful end product job.

In terms of job creation, over 120,000 direct and indirect jobs are projected to be created by UBOS for the benefit of the youths and other Ugandans scheduled to work as enumerators and for purposes of tallying the results of the census.

Since they say failure to plan is to plan to fail, each and every Ugandan must endeavor to be counted on the days designated by the government since the government cannot meaningfully plan for people it doesn’t know.