Last year, Colombia did a census. This isn’t done on a regular basis, as in the US, but every now and then the legislature decides it’s time. It had been something like 12 years since the last time a census was done. It was pretty interesting to me to participate.
A few things were kind of cool about it. For one thing, it was done door-to-door, not by mail (because the mail system here is pretty dysfunctional) and not by phone. The government would let people in a certain neighborhood know about a week in advance what day the census-takers would come around, and on the day assigned, you HAD to stay home. If you were planning to be out of town, or had a meeting, or just needed to be at work for some important reason, well, you just had to cancel all that. The fine for not being home on the day of the census was very, very heavy. At my job, people would just say which day they had census, and they were given the day off. I got assigned census on a Saturday.
Just like in the US, there was a short form and a long form census, randomly assigned. I got the short form. So, there were just about 15 questions, and lots of them were income-related, such as, “How many days last week did you go without food because you couldn’t afford it?”
When the results came in, people were a little disappointed. The projections were that there would be something like 42 million people in the country and maybe 7 or 8 million in Bogota. It turns out the country’s population is more like 39 million and Bogota has maybe 6 or 6.5 million. But, also just like in the US, lots of people claim there is massive undercounting because of lack of participation by homeless and poor people.
I remember a commercial on TV trying to encourage minorities and poor people to participate. It showed a black woman identifying herself by all the terms a black woman could be called (negra, afrodesciendente, etc.), and then a tagline that said, “En este censo, todos contamos! (In this census, we all count!). I watched it once with Jose, and made a comment to him that the commercial wouldn’t be reaching its audience, since most poor people probably don’t have TV’s (they’re much more expensive here than in the US). He said, no, everyone had a TV, everyone! In fact, he said, the poorer the family, the bigger the TV. I thought, just like in the US.
Census results from DANE, the statistics agency of Colombia, are here ( but in Spanish).
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