Expert-Grup

10 Myths about the 2024 Population and Housing Census in Moldova

AlteleProtecția socialăMonday, 26 February 20247640 views
Project:
Monitoring the pilot phase of the population census

Automatically translated summary. The full text is available in Romanian.

Moldova will hold its Population and Housing Census from 8 April to 7 July 2024, collecting data on the population and on housing conditions. As misleading claims about its “real purposes” spread in the press and on social media, the Independent Think Tank “Expert-Grup” checked the ten most common rumours.

The article rejects most of the myths. The census is not meant for taxation, military mobilisation or electoral fraud: it is held every ten years, and individual data cannot be passed to other authorities, only aggregated results are published. Data are collected on tablets, sent in encrypted form to a secure server and deleted from the device. Questionnaires contain no questions on income or property.

The census costs MDL 329 million from the state budget (MDL 244 million in 2024), plus EUR 2.075 million from the EU and UNFPA. Existing databases are incomplete and lack data on ethnicity, language or religion. Participation is mandatory under Article 7 of the law. Preliminary results are due by 7 January 2025, and final ones by 7 January 2026. The 2014 results were published in full, though late.

View the original in Romanian