The National Population Commission (NPC), has said that the mentally-deranged, homeless people and every living being in Nigeria would be counted in the upcoming 2023 housing and population counting.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the NPC Federal Commissioner representing Ondo State, Prince Diran Iyantan, said this in Akure on Wednesday, during a one-day capacity building workshop for the 2023 population and housing census publicity committee.

Iyantan, who assured Nigerians that the 2023 census would have at least 98 per cent success, explained that the purpose of the workshop was not to undermine the professionalism of the publicity committee members.

He noted that the committee was one of the most important committees to drive the exercise, due to the psyche of the public. This, he said, was because many people were usually reluctant to subscribe to government programmes.

“Because of the importance of this exercise, our governor, Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, thought it wise to assemble the committee with seasoned professionals to have a seamless exercise in the state”, he said.

Speaking on the digital innovations in the 2023 census, the State Director of NPC, Mr Oluyemi Falusi, said digitisation of the census was in line with UN recommendations.

Falusi said that the 2023 exercise would be the first digital census to be conducted by Nigeria, adding that it would facilitate faster processes, reduce error, track progress, ensure efficiency and ensure prompt publication of results, among others.

He explained that the training, recruiting, deployment, conduct, analysis and publication and other processes of the exercise were fully digitalised.

Falusi also said that the 5-tier strategy being deployed for quality assurance, robust monitoring and evaluation system had been set up.

He added that there would be a call centre and a situation room in the state to assess the daily progress of the exercise.

He further said that data analysis would be done promptly with available digital technology tools to ensure reports were published promptly.