THE bulk purchase of the wrong kind of pencil has helped delay the final results of a national census in Kenya by some eight months, a local newspaper reported. According to the paper, when seven million people answered census questions last August, officials should have used soft HB pencils but were instead given harder H-grade pencils. The harder pencils produced writing that automatic scanners were unable to read. To make matters worst, the pencils were bought at almost double their real price, the paper added. Other problems in processing the census information, include computer hard drives with insufficient data capacity and “the inability to scan the data due to the poor quality paper of the questionnaires. Scanning only began five months after the final results were meant to been released.
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