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Challenges and Lessons Learnt​

COVID-19 led census planners to seek innovative cost-saving measures, such as the sharing of resources and expertise through South-South cooperation. For example, Kenya donated computer tablets to several other African nations for their census activities.

While essential, these partnerships come with their own risks and require careful management such as:

  • The inclusion of the many stakeholder requests changed the project from a typical cartographic exercise to a statistical undertaking. Several countries including Uganda and Namibia experienced this dilemma.

  • Becoming overly dependent on a single private sector vendor for technology can lead to vendor lock-in.

  • Storing sensitive citizen data on foreign-owned cloud servers raises legal and security questions can jeopardise data sovereignty.

  • Different partners may have conflicting priorities or timelines that are misaligned with census goals.

  • A lack of knowledge transfer can leave the NSO dependent on external support for future projects hence lack sustainability.