“Counting people should never cost a country its ability to make people count.” These words, first voiced during a 2015 keynote address by South African statistician Pali Lehohla at a UN Data Forum, warned of a dangerous paradox in national planning. In essence, Lehohla meant that the act of collecting statistics—however important—should not compromise the delivery of essential services that those statistics are meant to improve. Uganda’s 2024 national census embodied this contradiction. For instance, UGX1.61 billion meant for the Parish Development Model (PDM)—a programme targeting 39 percent of households stuck in subsistence—was diverted to plug funding gaps in the…
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