The High Commission for Planning (HCP) organized, Thursday, February 23, 2023 in Rabat, a press briefing dedicated to the presentation of the preparatory work for the General Census of Population and Housing (RGPH) 2024.
Speaking during the press briefing he chaired, the High Commissioner for Planning, Ahmed Lahlimi Alami, indicated that the next RGPH, 7th since Morocco’s independence, will be carried out in September 2024, in application of the guidelines royalties, and in accordance with the recommendations of the United Nations Statistical Commission to carry out the population census at least once every ten years.
Lahlimi notes in this sense that the RGPH 2024 is part of the context of the digital transformation of product and service lines, initiated by the HCP since 2019, and is characterized, from this angle, by a break with past censuses. . This break will be for the benefit of operational efficiency and optimization of the budgetary cost of the entire process of carrying out the next census, he said.
This rupture, underlines the High Commissioner, is reflected at three levels, the cartographic work which constitutes the geographical, economic and human basis, the method of collecting data from households, their use and dissemination, and finally the recruitment and the training of enforcement agents.
And to let it be known that the cartographic work, the general objective of which is to provide the collection staff with digital cartographic funds corresponding to the various administrative divisions and the various statistical zones, is supported by an IT solution developed in-house by HCP executives comprising mobile modules on the tablets used by the investigators as well as web modules intended for monitoring fieldwork at the central, regional and provincial levels.
These applications allow the division of the national territory into “enumeration districts” to ensure, during the execution of the census, the exhaustive enumeration of the population, without risk of omission or duplication, as well as to stop the human and material resources necessary, explains Lahlimi, adding that it is a solution that also covers the georeferenced mapping of economic establishments and the collection of data relating to their activities and human resources.
The High Commissioner also notes that the new approach adopted during this census aims to cover the maximum amount of useful data, noting in this sense that data will be collected from households by a double quiz.
According to Lahlimi, the first will be aimed at the general population and specifically covering data on demographic structures as well as rare phenomena, such as international migration and mortality. As for the second detailed questionnaire, it makes it possible to introduce new themes (demographic events, social protection, use of ICT, international migration and the environment) and to deepen existing ones.
This detailed questionnaire, he noted, is addressed to the entire population of municipalities with less than 2,000 households and to a sample of 20% of households in municipalities whose size is greater than or equal to 2,000 households.
Regarding the evaluation of the IT solution, Lahlimi indicated that “un first real-time test is being carried out in the Rabat-Salé-Kénitra region“.
Following this operation, which will be completed towards the end of February 2023, cartographic work and the mapping of economic establishments throughout the national territory will be launched at the beginning of April 2023 for a period of 14 months.