The census project will be run by Svetlana Raudonen

Svetlana Raudonen has professional experience in both the public and private sectors. She has worked for subsidiaries of Eesti Energia, Hansapank, Tallinn City Enterprise Department, Helmes AS and the Tax and Customs Board. Svetlana has gained international experience when working at the Permanent Representation of Estonia to the European Union. During the Estonian Presidency, she chaired the Customs Presidency and was also the head of the Council of Europe’s Customs Union working group. She considers the successful management of an IT team made up of experts from 13 Member States to be her greatest achievement in recent years. The main objective of the expert team dealing with the digitalisation of customs was to study and analyse the development of the integrated system and the creation of a large-scale (EU-wide) centre of competence.

Svetlana Raudonen is excited to take up a new position and believes that the 2021 Population and Housing Census, which uses a significant amount of registers’ data, is an important turning point in the history of Estonian censuses. “A high-quality census using the full potential of e-government promises to be Estonia’s next e-success story. I believe that my previous work experience in creating and developing modern e-services and IT systems and working with different actors will be helpful in organising the census,” she said.

Mart Mägi, Director-General of Statistics Estonia, values highly the experience of Svetlana, who joins the staff of Statistics Estonia next year. “There are two years to go to the Census and I am delighted that a person who has successfully managed several international IT projects will join Statistics Estonia,” he commented.

The 2021 Population and Housing Census will be carried out with the census moment on 31 December 2021 and the data collection will take a month (from 1 to 31 January 2022).