Rosstat delegation, led by the Head of the Service Pavel Malkov, visited Minsk on October 19-20 and studied Belstat’s experience in conducting the digital census.
In October 2019, the Republic of Belarus was one of the first CIS countries to have conducted a new decade census using modern IT technologies. “It was important for us to see how it all works, how people react to it. This will allow us to avoid making mistakes. “The Internet census, tablets for enumerators, digital maps, new tools for data analysis and other things - all these form different requirements for organizing and conducting a census”, said Pavel Malkov. “The main innovations that we want to apply next year in Russia, are already used by our colleagues, one way or another”. According to Mr. Malkov, this is an invaluable experience that will be used next year in Russia during the census.
Pavel Malkov is sure that a digital census is the demand of time, as people work and communicate via the Internet. “If we do not provide such an opportunity, we will simply lose part of the audience. Nowadays people are often not ready to communicate with enumerators directly. Everything changes dynamically now, and we must give people an opportunity to respond at a convenient time and place”, noted the Head of Rosstat.
In turn, the Chairman of the National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus, Inna Medvedeva, reminded about preparation for the next meeting of the Russia-Belarus Statistical Council, scheduled for 2020. She said that we must understand, "what kind of work we will do". Among the priority topics, in her opinion, there are issues of demography, national accounts, the use of administrative data, geospatial and space technologies, and monitoring of indicators of sustainable development goals.
Touching on the preliminary results of the census in Belarus, Inna Medvedeva noted with a spirit of optimism that a fifth of the country's population filled out online questionnaires. This allowed to save time for data entering and processing, and reduce the number of enumerators and cost of the process. For example, 12.5 thousand people will participate in the traditional part of the census campaign — canvassing — which is four times less than in 2009.
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