The long-awaited National Census 2024 was officially launched today in the National Capital District

It's been 13 years since the last National Census and the country has been operating on guesswork with its numbers for planning and development purposes especially health and education.  

NCD Governor Powes Parkop who was counted at his residential area of Ward 11, Moresby North West in Gerehu, says there is a need to have accurate statistics of the country's population in order to properly plan development and in turn, its progress.

He says the country has been failing in the last 20 years due to this lack of accurate data and that he's been relying on guesswork to plan development for the city.

“We have permanent residents, but we also have semi-permanent residents and we have residence who come in and out any moment. People coming by PMVs, dingy, planes and a lot of people walk too. We need this information so that we can plan the city much better than we are doing now. The city infrastructure in inundated”, said Parkop.

The NCD Governor called on everyone to be counted.

Ward 11 Assistant Census coordinator Smith Yamanavan says there has been a cut in the number of enumerators requested among other challenges they are anticipating:

 Mr. Yamanavan said, “we have about 92 census units. We’ve been given 100 enumerators, so we have to break that up into teams of four which is 25 teams to cover 93 census units in two weeks’ time.

Definitely there will be challenges apart from voluntary participation of the general community and some of our people have not been selected to take part in the census enumeration program.

We have been cut down on teams we recommended, we hope there should be changes to include some more enumerators so that we cover all the census units in the wards.”

The National event scheduled to start on Monday 17th and end 30th June has seen a slow start with some areas of NCD starting today.

National Statistician John Igitoi says six provinces have started with most materials dispatched together with tablets for counting and actual counting to begin by Thursday.