Kuwait’s 1957 census: 206,000 people, and 45% were not Kuwaiti
Four years later the count was 321,000; by 1975 it was nearly a million. How a five-yearly headcount tracked the country’s growth.
Kuwait held its first official census in 1957 and counted about 206,473 people, of whom 92,851 had come from outside the country, according to the census history published by the Central Statistical Bureau. A 1988 United Nations case study of Kuwait’s population policy puts the Kuwaiti share at 113,622, or 55% of the total.
It was the first official baseline, and what followed it moved fast.
Four years, 115,000 more people
A second census in 1961, the year of independence, was run by the Department of Social Affairs and counted 321,621 people. The bureau says 62% were male and attributes the imbalance to migration from abroad. It was also the first count in which non-Kuwaitis outnumbered Kuwaitis: 162,173 against 159,448, in the UN figures.
The same study puts average annual growth between the first two censuses at about 11.1%, the highest rate in its table, which runs to 1985. Non-Kuwaitis grew by 13.7% a year in that period and Kuwaitis by 8.7%.
A law makes it regular
Statistics and Census Law No. 27 of 1963 made the Central Statistical Bureau responsible for the count, and from 1965 Kuwait held a full field census every five years. The UN table gives:
- 1965: 467,339 people.
- 1970: 738,662.
- 1975: 994,837, of whom 47.5% were Kuwaiti.
- 1980: 1,357,952.
- 1985: 1,697,301, of whom 40.1% were Kuwaiti.
In other words, the population grew more than eightfold in 28 years.
From paper forms to registers
The 2011 census was the first to use intelligent character recognition to read its forms, and was run in step with the other Gulf Cooperation Council states under the UN’s global census programme. The 2021 census was Kuwait’s first register-based count, built by linking government administrative records, with the bureau working alongside the Public Authority for Civil Information.
Photo: A carved wooden door of an old house in Kuwait. By Di7ane, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Central Statistical Bureau: Historical Overview of the Census; United Nations: Case Studies in Population Policy, Kuwait (1988).
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