The Innovative Methods of Contemporary ICT Application: Challenging to Enumerate on Population Census 2010 in Timor Leste

This paper aims to discuss the implementation of contemporary ICT application , called short messaging service (SMS), in supporting the monitoring process during the field enumeration period. This technology was remarkable useful, effective and cheap to overcome the field monitoring in Timor Leste which has geographical and infrastructure barriers. Best practices in the management along with field monitoring using SMS reports were believed to have positive impact on the result of the 2010 Timor Leste population and Housing Census. The differences of total population in Timor Leste between preliminary results (reported on October 2010, one month after field works completed) and final results (reported on April 2011) is only 173 persons out of 1.07 million.

Keywords: population and housing census, ICT implementation, SMS reporting.