7 News Belize

Census 2020 Coming Along
posted (February 26, 2020)
Almost a year ago, we told you how the Statistical Institute of Belize planned to carry out a census in 2020. The SIB wants to find out just how much the country's population has grown in the last 10 years.

They've been diligently making their preparations to get it done. And, according to the Deputy Director-General of the institute, there are only a few steps left before you can start seeing the field officers going from house to house, countrywide, to conduct the activity.

At a SIB press conference this morning, she shared a few more details with the press on how it will work, and

Diana Trejo - Deputy Director-General, SIB
"For the entire year 2020, SIB will be - our big focus will be on the census. We will continue with our regular economic statistics, but our big focus is going to be the census. We have been in preparations for the past 4 years for the census, and we're at right now is we have just completed the recruitment of our field staff. So, we spent a period of about 2 months, going across the country conducting interviews, and now, we have just about completed the recruitment of our temporary staff. That's our interviewers, supervisors, IT persons, administrative staff and things like that. We have already started with our first round of training. The first round of training is a two-week training for our most senior supervisors out in the field. These are the coordinators of the regional offices."

"Following that, we have two more rounds of training to come up in March, where we'll be training the field supervisors, and following that, we'll be training our actual interviewers."

"Our entire census is basically based on a complex IT infrastructure. So, we're not only collecting our data electronically, by tablets, but the entire support system - everything from payroll, to quality control, to supervisors monitoring the progress of the census, all of that is going to be done on an integrated IT infrastructure that our IT staff has been working on for a couple of years now."

"As data is collected, that information is going to feed into the system, which will feed into payroll, because we pay according to progress, according to households completed. So, once questionnaires are completed, that information feeds into everything from payroll, from mapping as mapping is being updated. As households are being enumerated, our maps are being updated in real-time as well. It feeds into our quality control. So, we're monitoring certain quality indicators in real-time. So, from day to day or from hour to hour, we can see if there is an area where we think that maybe there are data issues that we want to send the field staff to back out there to deal with it."

Representatives from the Guyana Bureau of Statistics are also currently in Belize. They are here to observing the techniques that the SIB will employ to carry out this year's census, for possible adaptation in that country.

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