Almost nine out of ten households have been enumerated in Census 2002 - excluding Regions 1 and 7 where work is yet to begin - and the National Bureau of Statistics is now going into mopping-up mode.
This is according to Chief Statistician of the Bureau, Lennox Benjamin, who said a core team from the bureau would be dispatched to the two outlying regions by next Monday.
Benjamin told Stabroek News that this weekend was the target date for enumerators to complete the field work in the remaining seven regions. In Region 9 enumeration had been completed since March to avoid the rainy season. The bureau is currently receiving completed questionnaires and these were being checked. Benjamin noted that there would be a "mopping- up" period for areas in urban Georgetown, which he expected would not last longer than two working weeks, once the bureau had ensured that the bulk of the field work had been covered. Some of these households were in Kingston, Queenstown, Castello Housing Scheme and sections of Campbellville. At that point, he said, a final public announcement would be made. The mopping-up period, he explained, was to verify whether or not households had been enumerated. He said the remaining households would be tracked down by the supervisor and the enumerator in the area.
Benjamin said persons had in general been very responsive and had been helping to identify areas yet to be visited or re-visited. This he attributed to the intense publicity campaign mounted by the bureau which he felt had been responsible for the public's shift from suspicion, particularly with the crime wave, to more practical concerns about visits, return visits and some of the questions. He urged households which had not been visited to make a report to the bureau.
Meanwhile, because the terrain in Regions 1 and 7 required river travel to access households, the bureau had left these areas for completion in the latter stages of the exercise. Benjamin explained that it would not have been practical to expend funds on bringing individuals from the regions, and train them, feed them and pay their maintenance when they returned to their areas.
He said instead a core team from the bureau would be sent, which would guarantee speed and high quality of work, devoid of errors, and that this arrangement would be much more economical. Excluding these regions up to last weekend it was estimated that 88% of the population had been enumerated and the completion of these areas, which he estimated would take two weeks, would effectively complete enumeration in all ten regions.
Benjamin also added that the bureau had received commendation for its work at the recent CARICOM statisticians' meeting in Grenada. Given the present background with the crime wave in the country, other nations commended Guyana in this regard, he said. The meeting in Grenada was held for a progress report and for preparation for regional and national analysis of data. He also noted that Suriname would draw heavily on Guyana's plan for use in their census to begin in March.
Guyana and Suriname are among the last of the CARICOM states to conduct their decennial census, which is being co-ordinated by the CARICOM Secretariat. The secretariat has set up a regional census co-ordinating committee, which comprises representatives of the census bodies of the various CARICOM territories, as well as those in Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos 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.