Population Census

Principles & Recommendations

The UN Expert Group on the Revision of the Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses is led by the UN Statistics Division and is working towards the modification of the publication for the 2030 census round.

At the first Expert Group’s meeting held online in May 2023, seven Task Teams were identified corresponding to the critical revision themes identified by the Expert Group. The second meeting, held on the 13 – 15th December 2023 in New York, brought together over 35 representatives from NSOs and international organisations to review the draft version of the revised Principles and Recommendations (P&R).

The EGRISS Secretariat has joined Task Team 7 ‘Population and Housing Topics’, to contribute to the overall P&R revision and specifically to the objective centered around harmonization of concepts, definitions, and classifications in the P&R with other international recommendations and guidelines.

International Recommendations on Refugee, IDPs and Statelessness have been recognised as one of key contributions to the document for the 2025 -2035 round of Population and Housing Censuses, and EGRISS participation in the task team will help achieve harmonization of the instruments. With this goal, key topics to review are: difficult to enumerate groups (involving refugees and IDPs) and the reason for change of usual residence and immigration (specifically for IDPs). Following the general approach, these include consideration for both traditional and register-based census.

The Task Teams are working during 2024 to undertake the agreed upon revisions and will meet in August to finalise substantive elements of the draft. The completed revision of the Principles and Recommendations will be submitted for endorsement by the Statistical Commission at its 56th session in 2025.