ADDIA ABABA, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian Central Statistics Agency (CSA) on Wednesday said that close to 180,000 tablets have purchased from Chinese technology giants, Huawei and Lenovo, to conduct Ethiopia's Fourth National Housing and Population Census.

The CSA revealed on Wednesday that the products had been tested and approved by the agency.

The East African country will, for the first time, apply a modern population and housing census procedure, which includes the use of mobile tablets for data collection.

Following the Ethiopian Public Procurement and Property Disposal Services international bid on behalf of the Central Statistics Agency, the two Chinese companies have agreed to provide the mobile tablets that will be applied for the registration process.

According to Biratu Yigezu, Director General of CSA, the products were purchased as part of the 3.5 billion Ethiopian Birr (128 million U.S. dollars) total budget that was secured for the census.

The two companies have provided 90,000 mobile tablets each as per the agreement.

According to experts at the CSA, the use of mobile tablet technologies during the data collection procedure will ease the census process by establishing effective data registration system so as to avoid duplication and double counting.