An Update on the Upcoming Population & Housing Census

A census exercise, estimated to cost the government somewhere around seven to eight million dollars, is to commence on May twelfth and conclude sometime in November of this year.  In Belize, a population and housing census is carried out every ten years and the data collected is used by government departments, agencies and other groups to plan for the future, to understand the lives of the most vulnerable groups in the country as well as to get a clear picture of the housing stock and living conditions. The census will be conducted by the Statistical Institute of Belize and today, the Deputy Director General Diana Castillo-Trejo provided an update on where the process is. She says that a first round of training has been completed for field staff, who have been recruited, for the data collection process. 

Diana Castillo-Trejo

Diana Castillo-Trejo, Deputy Director General, S.I.B.

“We have been in preparations for the past four years for the census and where we are at right now is that we have just completed recruitment of our field staff. We spent a period of about two 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, administrative staff and things like that. And we have already started with our first round of training, which are for our most senior supervisors out in the field, these are the coordinators of the regional offices. So that has started and will be completed by the end of this week. We have two more rounds of training to come up in March where we will be training the field supervisors and then following that, we will be training our actual interviews. At the end of last year, we did our questionnaire pilot—well our entire census pilot. We made some improvements to the questionnaire, improvements to the process itself. We use the pilot to help advise how our IT applications that are serving the census needed to be updated or improved. So the pilot was completed in December of last year and we are incorporating the lessons that we learn from that into our final preparations for the census.”