Cape Town - Statistics SA detailed on Wednesday the challenges it encountered during the Census 22, including the Western Cape, where it experienced challenges like never before.
The challenges ranged from technical glitches to recruitment and responses from high-walled and gated communities.
Farmers even chased enumerators, but not on the scale of the previous census.
Briefing the public service and administration portfolio committee, Deputy Minister in the Presidency Pinky Kekana said 100 000 enumerators were recruited to assist in counting more than 60 million people.
“Almost eight provinces are done. We only have the Western Cape that still remains to be concluded towards the end of May,” Kekana said.
In his presentation, statistician-general Risenga Maluleke said online interviewing uptake was not as much as they had hoped.
“Initial uptake about 33% of registered undertook computer assisted web interviews (CAWI). Recent results show 80% of people who access the link complete a questionnaire,” he said.
Maluleke also said more than 200 000 questionnaires were completed online.
He, however, said computer-assisted personal interviews collection showed much better rates of completion.
“Over 18.2 million households have been counted to date.”
He said data collection would conclude on May 31 to allow fieldworkers to reach as many households as possible.
He also said computer-assisted telephonic interviews were used for about 68 000 houses who elected to be counted.
Deputy director-general Ashwell Jenneker said they were pushing for more households to be interviewed online in the Western Cape, which has a low turn-out rate.
Jenneker said the province stood at 73% census count as at Wednesday.
“We monitor this every day to ensure we push as hard as we can.
“Things have turned around in that we got good co-operation from the government there. Even farmers phone, saying they want to be counted. Previously, they would chase away enumerators.”
Jenneker noted that the census took longer than anticipated and that it was conducted in the Covid-19 environment.
He told the MPs one of the challenges they encountered was recruitment of field workers and challenges with acquisition of vehicles.
There are still some challenges with payment of field workers as some are without bank accounts.
In the Western Cape, farmers chased away field workers while other people bluntly refused to be counted and there was no response in high-walled areas.
Calvin Molongo, a Stats SA official, said they had not anticipated technical glitches with online interviews in the event of unavailability of their website.
“Our domain was through SITA. It has got limitations in interactions we could have.
“We found it was a serious inhibitor,” Molongo said.
Maluleke said they started to actively get into work for census in 2018, but as they started there was Covid-19, which affected training in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape and pilot tests.
He noted the high levels of apathy in public participation on anything, including sample surveys and elections in the country and elsewhere in the world.
Maluleke said while the plan was to have a 100% rate of counting the population, it was not possible, but the post-enumeration survey would come handy to establish the undercount.
“We will know how to elevate and come to an estimate of the national population. The undercount when it is higher, we get worried. The higher it is, it tells us who we have missed and how to adjust the population to come up with an estimate,” he added.
Cape Times