Preparing for the 2000 Round Censuses in the Pacific
A seminar on "Strategies for the 2000 Round of Censuses in the Pacific", was held in Nadi, Fiji from 8-12 December 1997. The seminar was coordinated by the Uni ted Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the delegation of which was headed by the Director, Mr. Hermann Habermann. UNFPA sponsored the meeting and secretariat and other support services were jointly provided by the UNFPA Fiji Office and the UNFPA CST. Co untries that were represented included American Samoa, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuat u. Organisations represented included ESCAP, US Bureau of Census, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Statistics New Zealand and the South Pacific Commission.

The Seminar was held to discuss major aspects of census taking, including ways to develop more cost-effective methodologies, adoption of common approaches for census design, fieldwork, processing and dissemination. The seminar also cov ered the following themes : cost-effective approaches to population and housing census; census topics and questions; computer technologies for planning and data processing; and data analysis and utilization.

Recommendations

Some of the recommendations made at the meeting included :

the establishment of a regional network comprising National Statistical Offices (NSOs) and regional and international agencies;

NSOs to supply SPC with back-up copies of census data to assist countries in storage/safekeeping;

communications within the region should be enhanced through channels such as e-mail and the internet;

the core topics/questions for the 2000 round of census developed during the seminar should be adopted by countries in the region;

IMPS should be the standardized software for census processing;

based on the core sets of topics/questions, NSOs should design a minimum set of information that all countries in the network would produce in hard copy;

NSOs should maximize awareness of the census;

Common approach

A broad consensus was reached on the core set of questions to be incorporated into subsequent census instruments while individual countries will have the freedom to add more specific questions to address their own peculiar problems. In addition progress was made in all the countries agreeing to adopt the IMPS data processing package for analysis of the census data. This will require concerted efforts to formulate appropriate training strategies, perhaps using already trained nationals from the PICs to train nationals of countries yet to adopt Integrated Microcomputer Processing System (IMPS).

Census 2000 Workshop participants photo

Census 2000 Workshop participants

Background papers

Papers presented by the resource persons were: 1) "Cost-effective Approaches to Population and Housing" by Mr. Sam Suharto, Chief, Demographic and Social Statistics Branch, UNSD; 2) "Minimum Census Requirements: Size and Elements of Population Census Questionnaire" by Mr. Laurie Lewis, Adviser on Population Statistics, UNFPA CST Suva; 3) "Census and Data Processing S trategies" by Mr. Carlos Ellis, Specialist in Integrated Data and Information Systems, UNSD; 4) "Innovations for the 2000 Census: New Software and New Approaches" by Mr. Michael Levin, Population Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census; and 5) "Some Reflections on Census Data Analysis and Utilization" by Mr. Gerald Haberkorn, Demographer, South Pacific Commission. ‘