Exploring the Need for Blockchain-Based National Population Census

National population census provides the basis for governments’ financial, economic, health and education policies for its populace. It plays a vital role in mapping a country’s growth and financial trajectories and it is the single most valuable and shared resource among government departments and apparatuses. The centralized, traditional methodologies currently in use are faced with several challenges including and not limited to high costs, privacy issues, enumerating unsafe areas and reduced cooperation. This research aims to analyze through a systematic literature review the drawbacks and challenges of the current traditional methodologies used in housing and population census to identify if a decentralized system would assist in mitigating them. The drawbacks identified are population coverage, ethnic and racial discrimination, privacy concerns, census data distribution, cost of census, and cooperation and participation. The research, even though at an embryonic stage, shows that blockchain-based solutions may be a candidate for solving several of the above mentioned challenges while laying at the same time the foundations of our research on blockchain-based systems for tackling with other challenges faced within census such as that of the missing people.