Kenya Government to Use Tablets Assembled in Local Universities for Census

We are officially in a census year and this means that the government is hard at work to deploy people to do a nationwide population census.

The census will be done this month and today, the government has announced that the census will be done on August 24th and 25th of this year. To that effect, the President today announced that the following Monday, August 26th has been declared a public holiday to allow “maximum enumeration of Kenyans.” There will be 2,467 technology supervisors, 22,268 content supervisors and 138,572 enumerators that will coordinate this important exercise.

The most interesting bit about the briefing is that the President revealed an interesting tidbit about the census and it revolves around the tech.

The President says that he was “proud that the mobile telephony devices and other accessories that will be used in the activity have been locally assembled at Moi University and the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. (JKUAT)”

This is pretty interesting and it shows that the government is moving with the times to capture such data with modern technology.

The government will use 164,700 devices that will be procured from the two universities and will cost the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics a cool Kshs 470.5 million. The devices will contain questionnaires, area maps and tracking software. Each devices goes for around Kshs 15,000. JKUAT will assemble 60% of devices while Moi University will assemble the remaining 40%.

According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, for the first time, all the data required for the census will be captured electronically through a tablet computer an the whole enumeration process will be paperless. They say it guarantees the data will be captured faster than ever before and data will be “more secure.”

Well, we will get to see what kind of gadgets the enumerators will be using in this census. We saw the government employ modern technology in previous exercises like the Huduma Namba one and I’m now curious about these ones that were assembled in local public universities.