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By David Hutt
August 14, 2019

The rhetoric and reality behind this much-anticipated step have raised concerns about its results and significance.

For the last two years, the Cambodian government has been touting the fact that, for the first time, it will be putting up most of the money to pay for its own population census, as opposed to previous ones in the past that were paid for by foreign donors. But the way in which the process has been conducted has already raised concerns about the results and their significance.

The government paid the 50,000 or so enumerators a little more than $6 a day for their work, about what a garment worker could earn. Each was expected to interview about 120 to 150 families, and since the census ran just 11 days this meant they had to do at least 11 interviews per day (or 50 minutes per interview for a nine-hour working day), which was always going to be an uphill task. One enumerator told VOA: “The [villagers] couldn’t even recall the year they were married, so we have to sit with them to calculate…

For instance, given that statistical surveys as important as a census succeed or fail on the caliber of those conducting the questionnaire, it is certainly problematic that only about a third of the census budget went to paying enumerators (and begs the question of where the rest of the budget went, since Beijing reportedly donated $2.5 million worth of vehicles and computer equipment for the task). If the government had doubled the budget to over $20 million, still a small portion of the national budget, it could have hired another 50,000 enumerators, meaning each would have been able to spend more time interviewing each family, or paid the existing 50,000 enumerators double, about $12 a day. Also, why only give them an 11-day period to complete the census? When Vietnam conducted its census this year, it had a 25-day window.

Fullhttps://thediplomat.com/2019/08/what-does-cambodias-new-census-reveal/

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