Laos has wrapped up the field phase of its 2025 Population and Housing Census (PHC), the country’s first conducted entirely on digital devices, a significant shift in how the nation collects and manages population data.
Over eight weeks from early November 2025, more than 12,000 enumerators deployed across the country with tablets, reaching 3.6 million buildings, 99 percent of the counting target, by late December. To ensure no household was overlooked, follow-up visits to over 3,500 areas were carried out in early 2026.
The shift replaced a system where paper questionnaires had to be physically transported from remote villages to processing centres, manually coded and entered into databases, a process taking weeks and prone to error.
Under the new system, data synced in real-time to a secure central server at the Lao Statistics Bureau, giving managers an immediate view of field progress across all provinces. Built-in tablet validation checks further reduced errors by flagging missing or inconsistent entries before enumerators even left the household.
The technology also extended to the challenge of finding households in the first place.
Satellite imagery and digital mapping further supported the operation, helping field teams systematically locate and pre-identify households, particularly critical in a country where over 70 percent of the land is mountainous or hilly terrain, areas where previous censuses had historically struggled to achieve full coverage.
The four-year preparation behind the census was led by the Lao government, with The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) Laos providing sustained technical expertise and financial support throughout.
Other partners included Australia, China, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the United States, and the World Bank.
UNFPA Representative in Laos Bakhtiyor Kadyrov said the census went beyond a population count, arguing that the findings would help shape policies aimed at improving well-being and ensuring the country’s most vulnerable were not overlooked.
For UNFPA, the exercise is part of a longer-term push to strengthen Laos’ statistical infrastructure, transferring knowledge and systems intended to outlast a single census cycle and support evidence-based policymaking for years ahead, Bakhtiyor added.
Census results are expected to feed directly into Laos’ five-year national development plan for 2026-2030, informing decisions on social policy, infrastructure, and resource allocation across the country’s diverse regions.


