Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) has officially started counting citizens across the country for the nationwide 2022 Census and Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele joined the team in Cape Town on the first night.

Stats SA is encouraging citizens to participate in the census, which takes place between February 3 and 28.

"I'm very excited to be part of the team. People move in South Africa. They go to informal settlements and so on. For socio-economic challenges, it will have bearing, whether it is access to sanitation and water," he said.

Stats SA’s Trevor Oosterwyk said government would ensure that citizens’ personal information would be protected.

"Once we've collected that data, it goes into machinery that processes the data and anonymises it. That means that from the data you cannot identify individual people. You can only identify numbers," he explained.

Oorsterwyk added that this was the fourth census and no information gathered during these processes has ever been leaked.