The Minister of Planning and Economic Development, Dr. Francis Kai-Kai paid a visit to the Geographical Information System (GIS) Lab at the Stats-SL Office, where he met with members of the GIS Technical Team to further follow-up and understand the procedures in capturing, managing and analyzing the data from the field in the ongoing Digital Cartographic Mapping exercise conducted by Stats- SL.
The GIS tool is a more efficient and digitalized procedure and methodology to support the process of conducting the census using vector and raster data and digital statistical division boundaries of the country. This is also a tool for user friendly visualization of statistical results.
During the visit, the Minister was updated on the use of the new technology that demonstrates post-field processes such as on-screen digitizing of all delineated Enumeration Areas (EAs) with their permanent unique coding identifier on the desktop software, validation to remove data errors, merging of all data into one geo-database, generating locality boundary for the country, saving and securing the geo-database in the cloud and preparing the EAs into printed maps and other readable formats for census taking.
The Minister also witnessed first-hand how the information sent by Mappers on the field were immediately downloaded, via an iCloud account system after vetting from the Quality Assurance Officers.
Dr. Kai-Kai in a short statement commended the process of the 2021 Mid-Term Population and Housing Census; noting that this census would review the last census exercise, look at any of its reported challenges, and try to address them, especially with the use of a Computer-Assisted Data Collection procedure.
He encouraged others to spend time to understand the technology-enabled electronic process of gathering population and housing data for national development.
Dr. Kai-Kai noted that the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development was fully supportive of Stats SL as they roll out the first-ever electronic census taking in Sierra Leone.
