First ever population and census atlas published |10 December 2005

 It shows the maps of different islands and represents attributes such as population, number and types of houses, distribution and type of water supply and household equipment in a given area, through coloured visual representations.

It also shows the percentage of homes in particular areas which have computers, mobile telephones and even the proportion of houses of a stated age in a given zone.

Copies of the 70-page four-colour document have already been sent to different school libraries and the various ministries, and members of the public interested in securing their own copies can obtain them from Room 147, Oceangate House at R150 apiece.

The director general for the National Statistics Bureau, Laura Ahtime, said this on Friday, when she also announced that copies of the 2002 edition of the National Population and Housing Census are also available at R200 each.

“The 2005 edition of Seychelles in Figures is also out and the booklets are available for R15,” she said.

Ms Ahtime said that it was hitherto not easy to publish a population and housing census atlas before the advent of GIS software.

“Since maps speak a thousand words, the census atlas, which provides spatial analysis of data, will no doubt provide an interesting means of communicating demographic, housing and household information more effectively to all users of data,” Ms Ahtime said, bearing out what is mentioned in the publication’s preface.

She said the production of a census atlas represents a milestone achievement in the efforts of the statistics section of MISD.

The history of map production dates back to 1994 when the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology was incorporated into the census undertaking process. The preliminary objective was to improve and facilitate the enumeration process. With the assistance of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), an extensive mapping exercise was carried out and Seychelles was split into about 400 sub-areas called Enumeration Areas (EAs) using the topographic maps. In most cases, the work was done on a scale of 1:2500. These topographic maps were then digitised using the ATLAS and ARCVIEW software.

In 1998 and1999, the Ministry of Land Use and Habitat (MLUH) in collaboration with MAPS Geosystems of Germany undertook an orthophoto mapping project for the three main islands of Mahe, Praslin and La Digue as well as the outlying atoll of Aldabra.

The purpose of the exercise was to create a new data set to replace the old topographic maps and to shift to a new datum. These orthophoto maps were made available to MISD for use in 2002 Population and Housing Census, when efforts to publish the atlas began.

They were nevertheless hampered by technical difficulties at the printers, hence it’s only now that the atlas has become available.

Ms Ahtime described the atlas as a thematic representation of various attributes using maps which provide a valuable and useful alternative for communicating statistical information to a variety of data users.

“A thematic map enables the statistics to speak through visual representation of the facts and further enables their geographic interpretation. These maps also demonstrate the capacity of GIS in statistical and spatial analysis and they show some of the population, housing and household characteristics in Seychelles based on the 2002 Population and Housing Census,” the director general told Family Life.

She said the methodology of representation varies from one map to another and ranges from colour shading representation to chart type maps.