Using CensusInfo Technology for Census Dissemination in Africa

This article from the African Statistical Newsletter discusses the dissemination of census information for maximum accessibility in Africa. As stated here:

"For census data to be truly useful for public dialogue, it needs to be easily accessible to the national and international community via the Internet in multiple languages. Potential users need easy, quick access to data in all of their customized disaggregation: by sex, age, geographical sub-levels and time period, for purposes of analysis, comparison and dissemination....The CensusInfo initiative aims to address this weakness by helping countries disseminate their major census results at all relevant geographical levels."

"CensusInfo is a royalty-free database system that provides a method to organize, store and display data in a uniform format, to facilitate census data sharing across government planning sectors, UN agencies, aid agencies, demographers and academicians. CensusInfo was developed by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and has been adapted from DevInfo database technology."

The article explores the progress of CensusInfo implementation in four African countries: Malawi, Egypt, The Gambia, and Liberia. The UNSD organised technical workshops in these countries. Specific outcomes included teaching database administration skills, as well as teaching how to use key CensusInfo features to assure data quality, and strategic planning to discuss specific dissemination strategies to make this data more widely available to a broad spectrum of data consumers.