‘A travesty’: Census 2022 fundamentally flawed, Stats SA confirms poor data quality and bias

Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) has admitted that valuable data collected from its Census 2022 is fundamentally flawed and not of good enough quality to be released for official or public use.

The agency this week announced the exclusion of crucial data from its Census 2022 amid questions about its credibility.

Concerns also include the data from the census potentially hampering the work of policymakers, researchers and government departments that routinely use the information.

The exclusion of the data amplifies the concerns previously raised by University of Cape Town demographers, Tom Moultrie and Rob Dorrington, about its integrity.

Census 2022 exclusions

In an updated version of its publication, “Census 2022 in Brief”, on its website under a section titled “Exclusions”, Stats SA states that some of the data that had been scheduled for release would no longer be published.

“Based on census data quality evaluation exercises undertaken by Stats SA’s subject matter specialists and Census 2022 technical experts on various census themes, the following variables/themes will not be published and are therefore not part of this report,” it said.

The themes include:

• Income and earning

• Labour and employment

• Mortality and fertility

Check out the Census 2022 report here: Census 2022 in brief

R2.3 billion loss to taxpayers

The report argued there is a 30% undercount and errors in the post-enumeration survey which have rendered the data unusable, resulting in a R2.3 billion loss to taxpayers.

It also stated the absence of reliable income data, disrupts Treasury’s resource allocation, complicating National Budget decisions and that incomplete mortality and fertility data impede health planning and the assessment of critical programmes like childhood immunisation.

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A travesty: lessons for 2031

Commenting on the Stats SA report on X, Moultrie said despite their early concerns that the data from Census 2022 is “not fit for purpose, and Stats SA’s vocal defence of it”, Stats SA’s latest publication said the census cannot be relied upon to provide useful data on a number of crucial indicators.

“This is a travesty: the size and the scope of the census usually permit all kinds of users (economists, demographers) to explore income, employment, demographic indicators to a fine level of granularity. It provides one of the key pegs for parametrising population projections which feed into a host of policy and programme initiatives. None of this, seemingly, will be possible.

“It’s past time that we got to the bottom of what happened in the 2022 census, and what went wrong so that we can learn lessons in time for 2031,” Moultrie said.

This is a travesty: the size and the scope of the census usually permits all kinds of users (economists, demographers) to explore income, employment, demographic indicators to a fine level of granularity. It provides one of the key pegs for paramterising population projections…

— Tom Moultrie (@tom-moultrie.bsky.social) (@tomtom_m) August 20, 2024

Concerns “unfounded”

Statistics SA in July was adamant that the Census 2022 met data collection standards despite clear anomalies by Moultrie and Dorrington describing Census 2022 as setting “an undesirable record – the highest undercount” on a national survey yet recorded by the United Nations Population Division.

Stats SA at the time said concerns by the demographic experts that the results of Census 2022 cannot be relied upon were “unfounded and misleading”.

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