National Statistical Office (NSO) says it has made almost 99 percent progress in the 2018 Population and Housing Census which ended on September 23.

Speaking at a presser in Blantyre on Monday, NSO Commissioner of Statistics Mercy Kanyoka said the exercise has made an exciting progress.

“We have successfully finalized the population and housing census field work, so far we have covered almost 99 percent of enumeration areas, we are only remained with few areas that were left out due to boarder disputes among other few reasons,” Kanyoka said.

However, she was quick to admit that the exercise faced a number of glitches such as delayed payments of enumerator’s training allowance.

Kanyoka said, currently NSO is working tirelessly to iron-out all challenges that have been there.

“We are addressing the issue of allowances, you will appreciate that not all school leavers have bank accounts, we recruited some that did not have bank accounts and worst still some gave us bank accounts of their relations which brought a mismatch in the system.”

“For your own information we had money amounting to K1 billion returned from the bank due to the mismatch which was created,” she said.

Kanyoka further asked all enumerators who are keeping tablets that were used in collection of data to return to NSO saying some of the tablets were borrowed from UNFPA.

“According to the contract which the enumerators signed, they are supposed to give us the tables back so if anyone hold on to the gadgets we will engage law enforcers because of the 25,000 tablets only 5000 are for government and the other 15 were borrowed from UNFPA.”

“There is already a process in place to make sure the tablets are shipped to Zambia which will be conducting their census in 2020 and then they will again be shipped to Zimbabwe for their 2022 censures,” she stressed.

This year NSO used about K20 billion in the exercise with 20,000 enumerators and 5,000 monitors.

Preliminary results of the Census are expected to be out by December this very year.