The UBOS Executive Director, Dr.Chris Mukiza has said despite glitches, the first day of the national housing and population census was largely a success.
“We managed to cover 560,000 households out of the one million which was our target for day one,” Dr.Mukiza said.
Glitches
Ugandans have been up in arms over several glitches that marred the opening day of the census exercise.
With the day of May, 10 gazetted as a public holiday, a number of Ugandans stayed home to be counted but many reported that they never saw the enumerators.
Many insisted that they had wasted their valuable time at home without being enumerated.
There were also glitches in the tablets used for the enumeration exercise as many of them failed to work while in other areas, enumerators protested the contradiction in the allowances they are supposed to get and what was indicated in their appointment letters.
Many refused to work on the first day until the contradiction is rectified.
On the other hand, some enumerators were not able to use the tablets.
Speaking on the Capital Gang on Saturday, Dr.Mukiza said he was sorry for the glitches but insisted the exercise was largely successful on the first day.
“As UBOS, we are sorry for not covering enough but there’s no way we could enumerate the whole country in one day . Also, the reason we asked for a public holiday was for recall purposes.”
He explained the mishap in tablets failing to work in some instances.
He said that at the end of the training, the tablets were mistakenly left in “training mode” as the trainers forgot to change them into “enumerations mode.”
“ Yet the enumerators can’t, on their own, do that realignment.”
He said there were also issues by enumerators recruited by some political leaders in some local governments for their own selfish interests, ignoring the original recruitment guidelines by UBOS.
“Such glitches happen everywhere and that this is why the process is designated to go on for 10 days, the time which is enough to ensure that every person or household gets enumerated.”
The census runs for 10 days until May, 19.
