UBOS calls for refugee outreach for accurate census
Mr Hilary Onek, the Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees shares a light moment with Ms Lilian Aber, the State Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees during the refugees' stakeholders engagement in Kampala on April 18, 2024. PHOTO | SYLIVIA KATUSHABE
What you need to know:
- Hailing from communities with different customs and briefs he said, some refugees believe that they will die upon being counted.
The Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) has tasked stakeholders working with refugees to spread awareness about the upcoming national population and housing census in May 2024.
Mr James Muwonge, the Director of Methodology and Statistical Coordination at UBOS, said some refugees presume that being counted is a move to send them back to their home countries.
Hailing from communities with different customs and briefs he said, some refugees believe that they will die upon being counted.
“We need to continue to support this exercise, let’s be ambassadors in different settlements that you know, the census is coming and whoever will be in this country on census night will be counted,” Mr Muwonge said.
He made the remarks during a refugees’ stakeholder engagement in Kampala on Thursday.
UBOS is collaborating with the Office of the Prime Minister to coordinate the process. This includes compiling lists of enumerators and supervisors who will be responsible for data collection in refugee settlements. Training for these roles is currently underway at the district level.
The census exercise will be carried out with digital technology to enable UBOS produce accurate and timely demographic, social and economic statistics. This will be the first digital census in the country with at least 114,460 enumerators and 18,483 supervisors expected to participate.
After every 10 years, Uganda holds a national census and the last one was carried out in 2014.
The census figures play a critical role in guiding planning, policy formulation, and programme implementation as well as monitoring development progress in line with the national goals and objectives.
Mr Hilary Onek, the Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees has continued to decry decreased funding for the refugees in the country. He asked the donor countries not to forget the refugee burden in Uganda irrespective of the other emerging challenges in the world.
He noted that if the refugee situation continues to worsen, the country may be forced to send them back to their home countries.
“We have had problems where our government policies in certain areas have been challenged by the donors, but now let’s think about refugees now,” Mr Onek said.
