Census Data Archiving Seminar Presentation on Census Data

Census Data Archiving Seminar Presentation on Census Data Archiving: Confidentiality and Anonymizaton Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, 20 -23 rd September, 2011 Etambuyu Lukonga

Mission • The mission statement of the Central Statistical Office (CSO)is to provide a comprehensive national statistical system yielding timely, relevant and high quality statistical information to Government, private secor and the wider nation and interntational community. • The CSO is an organization responsible for the collection, compilation, analysis and dissemination of all official statistical data relating to the economic and social activities of the country

Cont’nd • This is to enable effective decision making and promote informed debate on the economy. For this data to be effective, it has to be disseminated CSO has a dissemination strategy in place. • The main objective of the dissemination plan is to ensure wide coverage of the different user needs by creating many products from census data and disseminating using different channels and media. e. g printed copies, website, electronic summaries etc.

How many Censuses Has Zambia Conducted? Zambia Has so far conducted five Censuses • 1969 • 1980 • 1990 • 2000 • 2010 All these have been successfully conducted and data archived and disseminated

Confidentiality • It is important for CSO to guarantee and strictly maintain the trusts of respondents. • Respondents need to be reassured of the confidentiality of their data

How do We Ensure Confidentiality? • Confidentiality of respondents is guaranteed under the provisions of the Census and Statistics Act, CAP 127 of the Laws of Zambia 1967. • Confidentiality is always a very important and difficult issue for the office wishing to allow public access to our information • At the same time safeguarding the privacy of individuals and businesses that provided the information.

Cont’nd • The basic goal of confidentiality measures is to keep data users from being able to identify a record for any unit of observation, but still provide the data users with the data they require. How do we do this? • The Director of the Central Statistical Office has to authorize access to information. Before being granted access to the dataset or any other information produced by the CSO, all users have

Cont’nd To formally agree to the following; • To make no copies of any files or portions of files to which he/she is granted access except those authorized by the Central Statistical Office • Not to use any technique in an attempt to learn the identity of any person or establishment. • To hold in the strictest confidence the identification of any establishment or individual that may be inadvertently revealed in any documents or analysis

Cont’nd • Such inadvertent identification revealed in the users analysis will be immediately brought to the attention of the CSO • The data will be used for statistical and scientific research purposes only • The data and other materials will not be redistributed or sold to other individuals, institutions or organisations without the written agreement of the CSO

Anonymization • We ensure that the data that we provide to our users is anonymized to a certain extent. • This is where we remove some identifiers such as names of respondents, names of establishments, addresses and also collapsing geographic and respondent characteristic details to ensure that identification of individuals is highly unlikely. • Only in Special cases are these identification particulars maintained but have to be under strictest conditions, and for academic use only (University of Zambia)

End of Presentation Thank you very much! MERCI !