The National Population Commission (NPC) has cautioned its facilitators and specialized Workforce against being influenced into politicizing the 2023 population and housing census.
The commission gave the warning during a ceremony to flag off the training of census specialized workforce and state facilitators in Lokoja, the Kogi state capital.
According to the Commission, the exercise must be seen as a service to fatherland and treated as such while urging the trainees to shun affiliation to any political party and make accuracy in data collection a watch word during their participation in the census.
Meanwhile, NPC had said earlier that at least 786,741 workers will be trained for the 2023 census.
In a statement on Monday, the commission’s Director of Public Affairs, Isiaka Yahaya, said that this set of functionaries would consist of 623,797 enumerators, 125,944 supervisors, 24,001 data quality assistants, 12,000 field coordinators, 1,000 data quality managers, 1639 centre administrators, and 59,000 LGA level facilitators.
Part of the statement reads: “In preparation for the conduct of the 2023 Population and Housing Census scheduled to begin from 29th March to 2nd April 2023, the National Population Commission has commenced the training of functionaries for the exercise in all states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory from Monday, January 23, 2023.”
The training which was being organised in stages started with the training of Census Specialised Workforce and facilitators.
Enumerators, supervisors, field coordinators, data quality assistants, and data quality managers are to be trained by the first set of trainees.
Truth Live News reports the Trainings are carried out via self-learning study and online training with monitored simulated hands-on and in-person classroom and hands-on training.
Furthermore, the statement disclosed that the workers were to be trained on census forms, census applications, data capturing processes, interpersonal communication, and basic troubleshooting of Computer Assisted Personal Interviews.