Improving Cost-Effectiveness and Relevance of Agricultural Censuses in Africa: Linking Population and Agricultural Censuses

Imperfect sampling frames and their negative impact on data quality have been a major technical issue in many African countries conducting Agricultural Censuses most of which are on a sample basis, due to the specific context of traditional subsistence farming systems in place. The paper is based on experiences of several African countries during recent years, in adopting some kind of coordination and linkage between Population and Agricultural Censuses in order to obtain, in a more cost effective manner, up-to-date and improved sampling frames for use in Agriculture Censuses and other subsequent surveys. In addition to providing information for building improved sampling frames and better sample design, linking the two Censuses offers many advantages. The agriculture module of the Census of Population provides complete enumeration of agricultural households (and sometimes information on rural communities) which allows presentation of data for small geographical/administrative units, increasing considerably the value and relevance of the whole census operation. Also as the same identification of households is used for both censuses there is scope for in-depth analysis using cross-tabulations of agricultural data with the socio-economic and demographic data from the Census of Population. The paper describes two country experiences and summarizes some of the lessons learned from these and other country experiences during the past 10 years