Kurdistan Region to employ thousands of students for census

ERBIL, Kurdistan Regin - Thousands of students are set to be temporarily employed for the Kurdistan Region census process, an official from the Region’s census team said on Wednesday, as Iraq prepares to carry out a nationwide census. 

“We need 13 to 15 thousand employees for the Kurdistan Region census,” Guhdar Mohammed Ali, the head of the technical and field division of the Kurdistan Region’s census, told Rudaw. 

Mohammed added that an electronic registration form has been opened for university and college students who are unemployed to work as enumerators. 

Each enumerator will be compensated with 250,000 Iraqi Dinars (around $165) per month and an allowance of 10,000 dinars (around 6.5$) for each training day.

The Iraqi Council of Ministers chaired by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani on Tuesday approved requests from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to conduct the census and put forth a condition that the KRG census committee must begin training enumerators as soon as possible.

The council also approved the KRG’s request to conduct the census based on residents' place of origin, using the 1957 census as a reference in disputed territories, addressing long-standing demographic concerns. 

A statement on Facebook from the Kurdistan Region’s Statistics Office on Tuesday linking the registration form detailed that the registration process will continue from Wednesday through Friday. 

The official census is set to begin on November 20-21. Iraq commenced its first phase in September by surveying and counting buildings. In early October, the census process began in the Kurdistan Region.

The process has raised concerns among some Kurdish officials about potential demographic shifts in disputed areas.

The decision from the Council of Ministers details that people will be registered based on their place of origin rather than their current residence.

Inhabitants in disputed areas will be recorded using information from the 1957 census. Immigrants and people living and working in other provinces will be registered per their area of origin. 

The decision also indicates that KRG representatives can be present at data centers in Baghdad for transparency. 

Hawre Tofiq, head of the Iraqi presidency’s office of relations and international organizations, described the decision on Tuesday as “good assurance[s] to prevent demographic change, and using the census only for developmental reasons and not political reasons.”