Abū Bakr al-Jindī, the president of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), has confirmed that his position as president has been renewed by a year for the fifth time in a row. The decision to renew his contract arises as a number of important events are set to take place in 2013, the most important of which is the economic census to be carried out in April of this year. Questions have arisen as to what form this census will take amid the critical economic situation in which Egypt currently finds itself.

The economic census carried out this year is in preparation for the bigger, and more important census to be carried out in 2016. The economic census starting in 2013 is broken down into three parts. The first experiment began on January 20 and will continue for 19 days. The experiment targets ten thousand families in three different governorates. The second experiment will target 25 thousand families from five different governorates. Finally, the third experiment, which will precede the official census in 2016 by only a few months, will target one hundred thousand families in ten different governorates.

So far there has been no official request to count the number of Copts. Nevertheless, al-Jindī has stated that if the authorities so demand the agency will count the real number of Copts living in Egypt in order to end speculations and inconsistencies surrounding their number. In so doing, it will ignore a ban the UN has put in place to prevent such a census. There has been no official census estimating the division of the population based on religion since 1986 after the UN recommended against it.  [Author not mentioned, al-Watan, Jan. 23, p. 2]Read original text in Arabic

[Author’s Note: a report of the same content came in al-Wafd, Jan. 23, p. 2] The article has no link online