Counting people is different from making their circumstances count.

You can count people accurately and still learn nothing about their situation. A headcount tells you how many, not what they need, what it costs them, or which of them is barely holding on. Numbers are essential and they can also become a way of registering people without attending to them.

Whenever you are working with figures about people, get one concrete story from inside them. Not instead of the data, alongside it. The number tells you the scale of the thing and the story tells you what the number is actually about.