National Census Must Wait until 2022!

Diana Trejo

Like so many things postponed due to corona virus, the national census taken every ten years is being pushed back yet again. Originally rescheduled for 2021, the Statistical Institute of Belize now says they have opted to reschedule once more. So don’t expect house-to-house census takers coming to visit you, during the COVID-19 crisis.

Diana Trejo, Acting Director General, S.I.B.

“Government has looked once more at the situation at the start of this year and so it was decided to post-poned until May 2022 for several reasons.  First and foremost, being the safety of our census workers and staff, as well as the respondents. As you know, census is a face-to-face type of activity and having people going from community to community and various households increases the risk of spreading the virus greatly. There is also the issue of response rate, within the context of a pandemic and a spreading virus – there is a strong likelihood that we may get some resistance from households to participating just for safety concerns of their own and we wouldn’t want to compromise the response rates of the census and then lastly the cost of course have to be factored in because conducting such an activity within this environment would involve a sizeable increase in what has been budgeted already in terms of safety equipment, increasing the size of staff to accommodate for drop-outs as persons may get exposed and need to be removed from the field and so on.”

The S.I.B. is however getting ready to prepare the labour force survey in April of this year. The results will be shared in June.