In the afternoon of May 17th, 2021, General Statistics Office of Viet Nam (GSO) held an online meeting “Sharing experiences on the 2019 Population and Housing Census” with National Bureau of Statistics, Maldives. The meeting will take place on May 17th-20th, 2021. Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong, General Director of GSO chaired the meeting.
Attending the meeting on the side of Maldives were Ms. Fathimath Niuma, Deputy Minister of Planning, Housing and National Infrastructure, Ms. Aishath Shahuda, Head of National Bureau of Statistics, Ms. Shadiya Ibrahim, Chief Representative of the Office UNFPA in the Maldives and some officials of National Bureau of Statistics. On the side of GSO, there were Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong, General Director of GSO, leaders and officials from several units under the GSO.
Speaking at the meeting, Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong, General Director of GSO expressed her honor to be trusted by the National Bureau of Statistics, Maldives to choose as a partner to share her experience in the preparation and implementation process. She said the 2019 Population and Housing Census was Viet Nam’s fifth census. This is the largest census ever, with more than 200,000 enumeration areas, nearly 27 million households and 96.2 million people being surveyed nationwide. The process of preparation and implementation of the Census took place over a period of 3 years, from 2017 to 2019. The period of information collection was 1 month from April 1st, 2019 to April 30th, 2019. At the end of the data collection period, GSO took only 6 months to clean, calculate and synthesize all the survey results of nearly 97 million people. Nearly 8 months after the end of the Census, Viet Nam held a conference to announce all the results. Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong hoped that the experiences shared by Viet Nam will partly help National Bureau of Statistics, Maldives to better prepare for the Population and Housing Census, such as developing a reasonable strategy and implementation roadmap to ensure the success of the Census in the Maldives, especially in the situation that the Covid-19 pandemic is still unpredictable. At the same time, she expressed her wish that through these working sessions, Statistics of Viet Nam and Maldives will have many opportunities to work together, helping the two countries’ statistics to develop more and more.
During the working sessions from May 17th-20th, 2021, representatives of leaders of the Population and Labor Statistics Department; Foreign Statistics and International Cooperation Department and Statistical Data Collection and Information Technology Application Department of the GSO of Viet Nam will share with National Bureau of Statistics, Maldives the following contents: (1) Introduction of the 2019 Viet Nam Population and Housing Census includes: New points compared to previous Census; Information technology application stages (from planning to implementation); Census information collected in Viet Nam; (2) The application of IT in the process of mapping the base of the communes and enumeration areas includes: determining the enumeration area, drawing an outline map of the area, making a list of households, applying IT application in household listing; (3) CAPI application and important notes; (4) Introduction to web-based surveying. Building a media website and some notes; (5) Census operations management and supervision including: tablet management for data collection, equipment management, supervisor’s role, recruitment and management of enumerators in the census…; (6) Building a website for management, monitoring and commenting; (7) Requirements and design of IT infrastructure for the Census, including: transferring data from the census area, setting up the Census server; (8) Lessons learned from the Viet Nam Population and Housing Census.
The two agencies will continue to spend time together to discuss and exchange problems related to the 2019 Population and Housing Census in Viet Nam, as well as discuss recommendations and guidelines for National Bureau of Statistics, Maldives for a successful Maldives Census./.