Articles / data-notes

The hardest people to count are always moving

أصعب من يُحصى هم الرُحّل

2026-07-26

Sudan's censuses have always had a nomad problem. Pastoralist families move with the rains, across state lines and sometimes national ones. Count them in April and you may count them again in June, two hundred kilometres away, or miss them entirely.

The 2008 census used special enumeration teams that travelled with migration routes. Even so, most experts treat the nomad figures as soft.

We flag this because Kordofan and Darfur numbers carry that softness. A density map of western Sudan is a photograph of a river: accurate for the instant, wrong five minutes later.