POPULATION AND HOUSING CENSUS TOOLKIT

A population census is the total process of planning, collecting, compiling, evaluating, disseminating and analysing demographic, economic and social data at the smallest geographic level pertaining, at a specified time, to all persons in a country or in a well-delimited part of a country

A housing census is the total process of planning, collecting, compiling, evaluating, disseminating and analysing statistical data relating to the number and condition of housing units and facilities as available to the households pertaining, at a specified time, to all living quarters and occupants thereof in a country or in a well-delimited part of a country</

One of the essential features of population and housing censuses is that each person and each set of living quarters must be enumerated as nearly as possible with respect to the same well-defined point of time. This is usually accomplished by fixing a census “moment”) at midnight at the beginning of the census day. This moment is the “census reference moment”.