UBOS to use sports to popularize next year’s national census

Statistics body, Uganda Bureau of Statistics has said it will use sports as one of the avenues to help it popularize the forthcoming housing and population census in August 2023.

Sport is a uniting factor in Uganda.  Whereas Uganda is a very disunited country, when it is sports and it is Uganda Cranes is playing, all of them are there. It becomes organically so if we can embrace all games and we will achieve unity in the country. We are going to use sports to promote the census,” said UBOS Executive Director, Dr. Chris Mukiza.

He was speaking to UBOS’ football team that presented to him a trophy they won recently during a tournament organized at Makerere University.

Dr. Mukiza said using sports will be a cheaper way of popularizing the census and to this he said UBOS teams will play with Members of Parliament, police, journalists, UPDF and other groups of people throughout the country as a way of popularizing and sensitizing the public about the census.

“We are going to look at it(sports) and see how we can mainstream it in our advocacy programs in every district. I think we should start sensitizing parliamentarians by playing with them so that when we go to ask for money they know what we are saying.”

The UBOS boss urged the bureau’s staff to not only focus on work and calculating numbers as this might cause stress for them but urged that they should as well participate in sports to ensure they keep fit but also relax their minds.

The census

Uganda will in August 2023 carry out the national housing and population census, an exercise that is estimated to cost shs330 billion.

The UBOS director for Digital Solutions and Data Capability, James Kizza recently revealed that they will go digital during the census and to this, at least 150,000 will be used.

He explained that it will be done digitally and data uploaded directly to the central server in Kampala with IT devices such as tablets to be used, away from the manual system previously used.

UBOS Executive Director, Dr. Chris Mukiza said that while recruiting, enumerators will be computer literate and able to use tablets to compile data.

He also noted that enumerators will have to apply for the jobs online.