Just under a year ago, finance minister Trevor Manuel opened the 2006 African Symposium on Statistical Development in Cape Town.
That gathering focused on the round of housing and population censuses planned in various African countries.
In his opening address, Manuel noted that the poor state of many national statistical systems in Africa made it difficult to measure progress in achieving the UN's millennium development goals. He noted that 19 African countries had not conducted a population census in the previous 10 years, nearly twice as many as in the preceding decade.
As a result, he concluded, progress in the implementation of development policies in many African countries could not be monitored with any confidence.
Encouraging all African countries to undertake population and housing censuses, and urging them to link the development of statistical capacity to the sort of data collection required to monitor progress in implementing the UN goals, Manuel reminded symposium participants that "this is the challenge for the statisticians, because if we can't measure it, we cannot manage it".
This week I am attending a follow-up symposium in Kigali.
The themes of these symposiums - how to ensure adequate data of quality to measure progress in African countries - coalesce next Monday, when Statistics SA's ambitious community survey will be launched.
This will be the culmination of a process set in motion during March 2004, when the cabinet proposed the introduction of an extended annual household survey to provide data at municipal level.
As part of the preparation for this survey, Stats SA undertook an extensive consultation process to determine the sort of information stakeholders expected as an outcome.
Ten workshops were held across the country in late 2004, attended by more than 360 stakeholders from national, provincial and local government departments, as well as research and educational institutions.
The community survey, the largest sample survey ever undertaken in South Africa, will be based on a sample of 280 000 households, compared with the 30 000 sampled in previous household surveys. In nearly 150 municipal areas with smaller populations, all enumeration areas will be covered, while samples have been drawn for municipal areas with populations of more than 100 000.
In planning what information the survey should gather, a range of needs had to be taken into account, including the government's development priorities, millennium development goal indicators, municipal budget allocations and academic analyses.
In addition to key demographic indicators such as fertility, mortality and migration, the community survey will generate some of the key indicators that the government identified as priorities in its 10-year review document.
Planning the sample for this undertaking has been a complex exercise. The country was divided into about 80 000 enumeration areas, each attached to a municipality.
The survey will accommodate recent changes to some municipal boundaries.
Systematic, simple random sampling procedure was used to select the enumeration areas to be covered, and each area has been ordered by geographic type (rural formal, tribal area, urban formal and urban informal) and other types.
A pilot for the survey, which sampled just under 20 000 dwelling units, was conducted last February to test all systems, procedures, methodologies, logistics, and the prospective questionnaire design.
The pilot survey confirmed many of the lessons derived from the past two population censuses, noting in particular that access for fieldworkers to high-security residential estates in urban areas, some farming areas and informal settlements required particular attention and effort.
Fieldwork for the community survey begins on February 7 and will run until February 28.
The logistics and planning have been complex and the budget substantial.
The statistical methodologies employed are cutting edge, especially in sample design.
These are some of the elements required for the survey to provide reliable social, economic and demographic information attached to each of South Africa's municipalities.