About this planning checklist

A Planning checklist has therefore been developed to provide guidance on timing and scheduling of activities and tasks when implementing a digital census in Africa. This planning checklist is intended for use by national census implementing agencies and should be used alongside the UN Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses (UN P&R), Rev 4 together with the UN Handbook on the Management of Population and Housing Censuses, Series 2020, Rev 2. It should be one of key aspects of the digital census planning processes.

Despite the existence of guiding documents, there were notable challenges with activity and task scheduling in the 2020 round, which this checklist aims to address. The checklist is developed based on a review of lessons learned from progress made in the 2020 round as documented in the e-census handbook. Some of these challenges that arose from absence of a systematic task and time scheduling include:

• Incomplete plans: Some of the countries did not factor in their budgets and plans early enough for certain activities that arise from the use of technology in data collection like multiple pretests of applications before the pilot; pilot the cartographic application among others. They only realised the need for additional tests after or before implementing the pilot census.

• Time estimation: some countries underestimate the time allocated to selecting activities leading to delays and interruption of the subsequent phase.

• Comprehensive list of activities and tasks: lack of a proper integrated plan for each phase and for activities therein leading to a disconnect in task implementers causing some cross cutting components of the census not to be covered such as absence of publicity during the mapping, pilot etc. in some countries.

• Milestones and outputs: Lack of clear knowledge of the specific outcomes of each activity within a census phase and how it links and when it should be available for the subsequent phase.