Presenter: Tom Moultrie
Date: 16 October 2024
Time: 13:00-14:00
Venue: Seminar Room, Level 4, School of Economics Building

(light lunch served from 12:30 in adjacent staff lounge)
Format: In-person

Please RSVP for catering purposes by Friday 11 October.

In July 2024, Professor Tom Moultrie and Professor Emeritus Rob Dorrington (Centre for Actuarial Research, UCT) published a monograph with the South African Medical Research Council, outlining a number of substantive concerns with the data from the 2022 South African census, the headline results of which were released in October 2023.

Since the publication of the monograph, Statistics South Africa have announced that some data collected (including on fertility, mortality, employment and income) will not be made public, while a 10-percent public use microsample of the data has been released, allowing the reverse-engineering of the weights used to adjust the census data for the (world-record) 31% undercount. These developments amplify many of our earlier concerns about the data.

The seminar will provide an overview of the concerns originally raised, as well as reflect on the implications of our more recent investigations for our understanding of the quality and fitness-for-use of the 2022 Census data.

Brief presenter bio

Tom Moultrie is Professor of Demography at UCT. His research interests focus on demographic estimation from limited, deficient, and defective data; and the trajectory of fertility transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2020, he has been part of the SAMRC-UCT collaboration that tracked mortality in South Africa in near-real time through the Covid pandemic.