National Statistical Office (NSO)

Minister for Administrative Services, Richard Masere, in a statement released tonight said that all census tablets and related items have been dispatched nationwide with funding and allowances sorted.

The official commencement of the 2024 National Population Census is on Monday 17 June, the call centre will fulfil for the NSO and Census Head Quarter (HQ) the purpose for communication monitoring and coordinating the census operations conducted in the field (Provinces). Furthermore, the call centre will coordinate information and queries coming in from the field/public throughout the country during the conduct of the activities in the field before (pre-census), during (enumeration) and after the main enumeration (post-census).

This is according to the National Statistical Office (NSO) and United Nations Population Fund population projections for PNG, providing national and provincial population counts through to 2050 by age and sex.

The figures are based on the 2021 population modelled estimates which placed the population at 11.78 million. These figures can support in planning for the future needs of the country.

Data collected gives clear development indicators, shows where a country stands and how well they are performing in terms of achieving the SDGs like poverty eradication and life expectancy rates.

In developing countries like PNG, accurate and reliable statistics systems barely exist and struggle to measure many of their indicators, many times using proxies to give estimates, says the National Statistical Office.

NSO says they and the government have a lot of work to do to improve the country’s administrative data.

This means during this period, the government had no reliable statistics for Gross Domestic Product to measure the country’s economic performance and book-keeping for national accounts.

However, this gap is slowly being bridged under the National Statistical Office (NSO) Reform 2014-2019.

As per NEC’s decision 162 of 2014, NSO for the last 4 years has been under strict reformation to improve processes and statistics as well as building long-term capability to ensure the future of NSO.

The major achievement so far is the production of outstanding GDP reports.