New Video on the Census from UNFPA

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides financial and technical assistance to governments undertaking censuses around the world. This is obviously a crucial task in our quest to know what is happening demographically in the world. They have created a video that highlights census activities in six very different kinds of countries.

As the film shows, conducting a census requires overcoming an array of different challenges in very different circumstances.

• In Chad, it has meant mapping vast, sparsely populated regions in the midst of political upheaval.

• In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it involved overcoming barriers that restricted mobility.

• In Bolivia, or the Plurinational State of Bolivia as it is now so aptly named, conducting the census required fine-tuning questions and translating them into multiple languages to meet the needs of dozens of ethnic groups.

• In Indonesia, the census tracks extremely rapid growth and urbanization.

• In Belarus, it counts the nation’s dwindling population.

Counting the World, which was produced through the generous support of the Government of Luxembourg through the Demographic Evolutions project, documents the many stages of the census process, from deciding what technologies to employ, mobilizing and training legions of enumerators, conducting public awareness campaigns, canvassing all households, collecting individual information, compiling hundreds of thousands or millions of completed questionnaires, monitoring procedures and results, and analyzing and disseminating the data.

It is available in a 21-minute version as well as a shorter 4-minute trailer

If you click on either of the links in the above line you should be taken directly to the online video.