Ministry workshop discusses mechanism for 2020 census

The Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics yesterday organised a workshop on the working mechanism with partners for the 2020 census, with participation of specialists, statisticians and system analysts from some of the government organisations. The workshop was part of the preparatory stages to conduct census on general population, housing and establishment in 2020.The workshop aimed at introducing the basic requirements of this census through the necessary statistical methods, and methodologies, and the participant’s view on the main activities of the census, which will contribute to the development and enhancement of practical knowledge related to the implementation phase. Participants can gain a clear understanding of how project management and planning is conducted, including preconditions that must be met for conducting a census based on administrative records and key factors to be worked on to ensure complementarity between source agencies providing the required data and to ensure the data quality through the construction and evaluation process in all stages.Sultan al-Kuwari, assistant undersecretary for statistics at the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, said the 2020 census will ensure rapid data collection and dissemination of results and provide them to users simultaneously, and will ensure comprehensive, sustainable and higher quality, comparing to previous censuses. He called on source agencies of statistical data to provide information and work on developing their databases and linking them automatically with the ministry in order to proceed with the implementation of the census.Al-Kuwari added that the new methodology proposed in the implementation of the census 2020 will meet three basic needs; meeting the national requirements for development and the regional requirements of GCC countries, and fulfilling the international needs of the United Nations and other international bodies, while the census will be implemented in light of the electronic link with a number of source agencies concerned with data on population, housing and enterprises.The 2020 census, which coincides with the GCC census, comes in line with the recommendations of the UN Statistics Division, which calls for the use of technology and available databases from source agencies. (QNA)