Stats SA says it is ready to conduct the nationwide population and housing census, and is encouraging citizens to participate in Census 2022, which takes place between February 3 and 28.

Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the population count was shifted from October 2021 to February 2022.

Addressing the media in Pretoria, Deputy Minister in the Presidency Thembi Siweya said Census 2022 was South Africa’s fourth population count post-democracy and the country’s first digital census where at least 165 000 fieldworkers would be deployed across the country to count everyone within the borders of South Africa.

Siweya explained that for the first time this year the country would see a telephone census, digital census and physical census. For the physical census, deployees would have Stats SA stickers for identification.

She explained that government needed the country's demographics for effective policy formulation, and planning for the short and long term.

These demographics, she said, ranged across household income and the number of employed and unemployed people in a household.

Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke firmly stressed that everyone within the borders of South Africa must be counted, whether they were in the country legally or illegally. Census 2022 was leaving no one behind, he said.

“Whether you are in high-wall areas, farms, villages, informal settlements you will be counted in SA Census 2022 because you matter. Stats SA will leave no one behind,” he said.

He stressed that the organisation had strategies that would help government reach everyone in the country, irrespective of their status, to ensure that everyone was counted.

The Stats Act and the Protection of Personal Information Act complementes each other in ensuring that individual data collected by Stats SA would not be shared with any external agency, Maluleke pointed out.

The last census was conducted in 2011, when it was found that the population of South Africa had increased significantly from 40.6-million in 1996 to 51.8-million.

In 2016, the figure was revised to 55.7-million based on population data such as births and migration since the 2011 census.