Abstract

The General Census of Population and Housing (GPHC) in Morocco is the set of operations that consist of collecting information on the ground, gathering, grouping, evaluating, analysing and publishing demographic and socio-economic data relating to all the country's inhabitants on the census reference date.

The GPHC is characterised by

- Coverage of the entire national territory;

- Individual enumeration, which involves the census of each individual geo-located at the level of housing and dwellings;

- Exhaustiveness or universality.

- Simultaneity: on the same precise date, people and dwellings are counted;

- Demographic and socio-economic characteristics for all geographical subdivisions and all population categories;

- Periodicity: Our country has conducted 7 censuses at ten-year intervals (1960, 1971, 1982, 1994, 2004, 2014 and the next GPHC in September 2024.

The GPHC in Morocco is carried out in close collaboration between the Ministry of the Interior (support for the coordination of the various operational phases of the GPHC) and the Haut-commissariat au Plan (Establishment of the conceptual bases, production and monitoring of the methodological and technical file of the census, exploitation and publication of the results in accordance with national and international standards.

In 2024, the adoption of digitalization of the general census of population and housing has increased the horizons of productivity in order to enrich the questionnaire by new topics mainly to inform the indicators of the objectives of sustainable development and for more information and demographic and socio-economic data on the living conditions of households and the population.

Digitalisation played a key role throughout the process of setting up the 2024 version of the GPHC.

Technological developments also included the adoption of digitisation throughout the preparation and implementation stages of the census system:

· Updating cartographic work with the introduction of the integrated IT solution (SII) developed by HCP executives to update geographical databases according to the administrative and statistical breakdown (geographical layers in urban and rural areas: regions, provinces, communes, districts, segments, blocks, etc. Roads, hydrography, landmarks, points, lines and polygons, buildings, premises for professional use, …).

· The training of staff responsible for carrying out and supervising the census: Free online training, spread over a period of three months, in exemplary collaboration between the HCP and the Mohamed 6 Poly-disciplinary University for the launch of the online training platform, followed by planned face-to-face training.

· Development of methodological updates:

- New approach to the selection and training of participants in the general census.

- Extension of the deadline for conducting the RGPH.

- Collection of data from households on two forms. - Addition of new subjects to the census forms (social protection/information and communication technologies).

- Integration of other topics (immigration abroad/ pre-school education/ civil status/ etc.).

Digitising the census is a major step forward in the process of collecting, analysing and using statistical information and managing statistical databases, thus offering advantages in terms of accuracy, efficiency, transparency and modernisation of the public administration for good governance of territorial development programmes.