JUST IN: 2023 census data will be error-free, NPC assures

Ahead of the 2023 population and housing census, the National Population Commission, NPC, has assured Nigerians of a credible and error-free demographic data.

Chairman of the Commission, Nasir Isa-Kwarra, gave the assurance on Wednesday, during the opening of First-on -Site Training Of the Trainers, TOT, workshop on Data Quality Managers for the 2023 Population and Housing Census, in Abuja.

The NPC Chairman explained that the training was important to give Nigerians a quality census free of errors.

He said, “These are processes to make sure we have quality census. The methodology of this data quality management system is different from what we used to have. For Nigeria this approach is the first time and we’ve appointed a coordinator who’s handling this task.

“Those that have been selected for this training, passed through series of tests and merit is the order of the day. Anyone you see participating in this training, merits to be here. That is why we want to give Nigerians an error-proof data and we have kept on emphasising data quality management.

“This team is being trained and they will go down and train others too in the process of data quality management at the grassroot level.”

Speaking in the same vein, National Coordinator Data Quality Management, Mrs Foluke Adebayo said over 150 Data Quality Managers are undergoing the training and that they would go ahead to train an additional 1,000 people.

She said, “Right now we are training 150 data quality managers, they will go further to train a thousand people and then the 1,150 people will train 25,000 assistants who are going to monitor the quality of the data on the field.

“These are technical people that are going to manage the data quality for consistency, completeness, coverage and timeliness, because census takes place simultaneously all over the country.

“They are going to manage the technical activities which include management of the hardware, which is the devices we are going to use for the digital census, the software, which are the applications we would be using for data collection and finally the people ware, which are the enumerators and other functionaries that are going to conduct the census on the field.”