In less than two months, the National Statistics Office will begin the month-long national census of the country's population and housing. For this undertaking, the NSO will field about 44 thousand census-takers (enumerators), 9,700 team supervisors, and 1,100 census area supervisors to collect data on the 15.3 million households in about 42 thousand barangays nationwide.

The enumerators will have a lot of area to cover, as these barangays are spread across the 298,170 square kilometers of the country's land area. The force of enumerators comprises public school teachers who were given training in conducting the census interview, which will take 20 to 30 minutes for each household. The enumerators will wear official Census 2000 IDs and will carry official enumerators' kits and relevant materials.

The enumerators will visit and interview every household, Filipino and expatriate, to ask basic information about the family - the number of people residing within the household, and their educational background, civil status, ethnicity, professions, livelihood activity, and other demographic data including their housing characteristics and amenities. The enumerators will use a questionnaire that will be processed using Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) technology.

The first official census in the Philippines was carried out in 1878 by the colonial Spanish government. The census yielded a count of 5,567,685 persons living in the archipelago as of December 31, 1877. The most recent census of population taken in the country was made in September 1995, which placed the population at 68.6 million, nearly a twelve-fold increase over the intervening 118 years.

NSO estimates that as of January 1, 2000, the Philippines has 15.07 million households. This is a rise of more than one million households compared to 13.5 M counted in September 1995.

NSO Administrator Tomas P. Africa said that the census will officially begin on May 1, 2000. All information to be collected about the population and living quarters, except for a few, will be counted as of 12:01 a.m. of the reference date.

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Page Last Updated: January 19, 2005