In preparing for Botswana next population and housing census, scheduled for August 2001, many preparatory activities were undertaken. These activities include the mapping and house listing exercise, which was lunched in October 1999, the pre-test conducted in April, and the Pilot Census conducted in August 2000.
Censuses are generally expensive undertakings in terms of the required resources.
It is against the background of huge budget and management of personnel involved that, all the operational aspects of censuses must be tested in advance to avoid failure. Experiences from a pilot census are therefore useful in taking corrective action as well as redirecting preparatory activities. In pursuance to that, a pilot census was conducted purposively in 61 Enumeration Areas selected across all the districts, from 23 to 31 August 2000. This exercise served as a learning experience and also provided a good testing ground. The purposive sample was selected to target those areas, which were perceived to be problematic in terms of terrains, potentially hostile, low and high-density areas.