Director of Statistics at the Central Statistics Office, Sean Mathurin provided an update on the National Population and Housing Census 2022. He said, in the main, the data collection with enumerators on the ground has been completed.
“What obtains right now is what we refer to as mopping up and cleaning up. What that entails is that you will still find enumerators out in the field and in instances where we visited a household and we made no contact, we would use that opportunity to revisit the household to see if we could make contact with the members of that household to do the enumeration. Also during the mopping-up, we would also seek to ensure that the numbers assigned to the various buildings are correct.”
Mathurin added that the Central Statistics Office has transitioned from the data collection to the data processing phase and has engaged the services of two development partners, namely the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC), and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
“With technical support from UNFPA, we will be producing the preliminary count for the 2022 Population and Housing Census.”
UNECLAC will facilitate a two-week capacity-building training workshop for staff of the Central Statistic Office in the application and use of a specialized software called REDATAM. The REDATAM software makes it possible to provide public access, via the Internet, to census and survey microdata in a way that permits interactive tabulation, calculation of indicators, and creation of maps, while still protecting the confidentiality of individual statistical records. Mathurin added that expressions of interest have also gone out for the hiring of a consultant for data processing.
“There will be two aspects of the data processing. There will be the actual data processing where a consultant will be assisting us in that and there will be the other aspect where another consultant will be conducting capacity building as it relates to the staff to do the data processing themselves. Because, as you may know, next year we have scheduled an agricultural census.”
Richard Harris, Deputy Director of Statistics at the Central Statistics Office said the enterprise census, which was conducted simultaneously with the population and housing census has been progressing slower than projected but he is however satisfied with the progress made to date.
“The population census would have given us all the details required to get a count, a basic count of the establishments on the island. However, the enterprise census was then attempting to have a greater degree of granularity. More detail in terms of the structure, the nature, and the operations of the establishments that would have already been counted by the population census. So I am happy that even if we don’t get full coverage in terms of the enterprise census, I am very satisfied that we would still be successful at getting close to a complete count based on the work that was accomplished by the population and housing census enumerators.”
The cleanup exercise for the National Population and Housing Census will continue for the month of November while the enumeration process for the enterprise census is projected to end on December 13th 2023.