Census trainers complete course
Stabroek News
August 27, 2002
The Statistical Bureau yesterday completed training some 55 persons who will be responsible for instructing the enumerators who will be going into the field to gather information for the Population and Housing Census.
They are to be appointed coordinators and will be playing a pivotal role in the management of the enumeration exercise. They will be heading a team of six supervisors who each have under them a team of 6-7 enumerators.
The training session covered issues related to the questionnaires to be used during the enumeration exercise and the duties of the supervisors and enumerators.
The coordinators will begin conducting training sessions for enumerators and supervisors in the various regions from September 2 to September 12.
The house-to-house enumeration exercise is due to begin on September 16 and will run for approximately six weeks countrywide save for Region Nine (Upper Essequibo/Upper Takatu) where it was done earlier this year to avoid the rainy season.
Chief Statistician Lennox Benjamin told Stabroek News yesterday that of the 55 persons who were trained 43 were selected from persons who had responded to the advertisements for staff to take part in the enumeration exercise. The remainder, he said, were staffers from the Bureau.
He said that most of them have had experience as senior teachers and/or demonstrated organisational ability as well as the ability to pass on what they have learnt to others.
Among the resource persons who conducted the training session are Statistician John Mensah who is the Census and Information Systems Consultant to the Bureau and Everton Pollard a demographer trained at the Australian National University.
Mensah is also the adviser on Information Systems to the Barbados Statistical Service and the government of Nepal and has had previous experience in the conduct of surveys such as labour force, poverty and household income and expenditure in Guyana, Barbados and Nepal.
Mensah told Stabroek News that save for the questionnaires, the kits to be used in the field are all in place. He said that the Bureau expects to have the questionnaires delivered here from Brazil where they are being produced by September 9.
Guyana and Suriname are among the last of the CARICOM states to conduct their decennial census, which is being coordinated by the CARICOM Secretariat. The Secretariat has set up a regional census coordinating committee, which comprises representatives of the census bodies of the various CARICOM territories, as well as those in Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands, the Universities of Guyana, the West Indies and Suriname as well as the Caribbean Development Bank and the Secretariat of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States.