The processing of data collected in a census constitutes one of the most important and challenging activities that have to be undertaken efficiently and expeditiously in order to justify the immense resources invested in a census. This activity entailed several processes: manual editing of the questionnaires after enumeration, data capture, data cleaning and validation, and finally tabulation. Government’s commitment to provide provisional results within six months after enumeration and final basic results within another six months greatly influenced the strategies and actions adopted. This paper describes the experiences made and the lessons learned during the processing of the census data.

Paper presented at Regional Workshop on Census Data Processing: Contemporary technologies for data capture, methodology and practice of data editing, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2008.