This is the largest and most complicated census Vietnam has ever conducted so far as it involves nearly 87 million citizens from 21 million households living in 63 provinces and cities nationwide.

Alongside the population census, Vietnam will conduct a housing inventory to review the 10-year strategy for public welfare.

The result of the census will help policymakers to draw up strategies for socio-economic development and national defence in the 2011-2020 period that take into account the population and their quality of life. An accurate assessment will help the Government to create policies to pinpoint difficulties and improve the quality of people’s lives.

This census will focus on labour and employment, besides demographic categories such as people’s age, sex, marital status, ethnicity, religion, rural and urban areas, migration and levels of education.

To prepare for the event, more than 5,000 training courses have been held for 30,000 census takers and the relevant documents, including the questionnaires, have been dispatched to all provinces and cities. Grassroots-level steering boards for the census have completed the necessary mapping work and census lists in communes and wards across the country to ensure that no one is missed out during the exercise.

This is the fourth time the country has conducted a 10-year population census since it was reunified in 1975.

The census will last until April 20 and the result will be made public in the third quarter of 2010.

Source: VOV