Implementing a national economic census at scale demands more than software familiarity. It requires the ability to design complex, multi-layered instruments and manage them end-to-end in the field. When the Lesotho Bureau of Statistics (BOS) set out to build its Economic Activity Census (EAC) in Survey Solutions, it needed training that could take its team to an advanced level, fast.
Commissioned by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat under its World Bank-funded Regional Statistics Project, rowsquared delivered a five-day in-country training workshop in Lesotho. The assignment built on an earlier engagement with the BOS in 2020, which meant the training could skip the basics and focus on what mattered most.
The workshop brought together eight BOS staff, including senior survey and census managers, and covered the full Survey Solutions ecosystem: questionnaire design in the Designer, data collection via the Interviewer app, server management, quality control, and data export. The EAC 2025 draft questionnaire served as the hands-on working example throughout, grounding every technical concept in a familiar, real-world context.
A strong emphasis was placed on advanced Designer functionalities: cascading selections, lookup tables, macros, and validation logic — alongside a holistic perspective on how design decisions flow through to fieldwork operations and downstream analysis. Participants worked through practical exercises that mirrored real census scenarios.
By the end of the week, BOS staff could independently design complex, multi-level questionnaires with built-in data quality checks. The training was preceded by an Inception Report and followed by a comprehensive Training Report with all training materials as annexes, leaving the team with a practical reference for future rounds.
