CASTRIES, St. Lucia, CMC – The Central Statistics Office (CSO) says it has engaged the services of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) as St. Lucia moves towards “mopping up and cleaning up” the National Population and Housing Census 2022.
“What obtains right now is mopping up and cleaning up. That entails that you will still find enumerators in the field and in instances where we visited a household. We made no contact; we would use that opportunity to revisit the household to see if we could contact the household members 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,” said the CSO Director of Statistics, Sean Mathurin.
He said the CSO has transitioned from the data collection to the data processing phase, and “with technical support from UNFPA, we will be producing the preliminary count for the 2022 Population and Housing Census”.
He said ECLAC will facilitate a two-week capacity-building training workshop for the CSO staff in the application and use of a specialized software, REDATAM, which 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.
“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 another aspect where another consultant will be conducting capacity building related to the staff doing the data processing themselves. Because, as you may know, next year, we have scheduled an agricultural census.”
CSO deputy director of statistics, Richard Harris, said the enterprise census, which was conducted simultaneously with the population and housing census, has been progressing slower than projected. Still, he is however satisfied with the progress made to date.
“The population census would have given us all the details required to get a primary count of the establishments on the island. However, the enterprise census attempted to have a greater degree of granularity. More detail in terms of the structure, the nature, and the operations of the establishments that the population census would have already counted.
“ So I am happy that even if we don’t get full coverage in terms of the enterprise census, I am delighted that we would still be successful at getting close to a complete count based on the work that the population and housing census enumerators accomplished,” Harris added.
The CSO said that the cleanup exercise for the National Population and Housing Census will continue for November, while the enumeration process for the enterprise census is projected to end on December 13.
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