Ecuador Census Review Raises a Data-Quality Risk for Local Analysis

An international consultancy requested by INEC for UNFPA has put a measurable data-quality caveat around Ecuador’s 2022 census.

The review says VOPA imputation reached 4.7% to 5%, representing 759,103 people who were not directly counted. When incomplete forms and records corrected during processing are included, the figure rises to 10%.

The review says that level exceeds methodological thresholds recommended by the United Nations and warns that assigning values to records can distort census results. It also describes slight adjustments to housing and household variables that tended to improve housing-quality indicators.

Implication for decision models

The review does not establish a replacement population number or revise a particular company’s market size. It does change how census-based analysis should be read. Models using location-level population, household, housing, or service-access data should distinguish direct enumeration from imputed, incomplete, and corrected records.

For businesses and investors, this is a model-governance issue rather than a headline demographic revision. The useful control is to document the census variable being used, the processing limitation attached to it, and whether a decision depends on a narrow estimate that may be sensitive to imputation.