Tuesday has been declared a national holiday to allow citizens to take part in the exercise fully.

Tanzania conducts a census every 10 years and this year's is going to be the sixth since independence from Britain.

In the 2012 census, results indicated there were 43,625,354 million people in Tanzania mainland and 1,303,569 in Tanzania Zanzibar.

UN data estimates Tanzania's 2020 population to be almost 60 million.

President Samia Hassan was among the first to be counted