By Telesha Ramnarine

WORK has continued unabated in the production of the final report of the National Population and Housing Census, and the second compendium will be disseminated in the new week, Bureau of Statistics’ Chief Statistician Lennox Benjamin has said.At a press conference hosted by Finance Minister Winston Jordan last May, Benjamin had indicated that the Bureau would have commenced dissemination of the final report last month, and that unlike previous censuses, the material would be organised in four main compendiums, to be released separately.

The June 30 target for dissemination of Compendium 2 was not reached.

“Because of our assessment of continued demands and enquiries, we had to re-order the dissemination of topics from what was originally intended. Thus, Compendium 2, while including the all-important topics examining the age-structure of Guyana’s population, now includes the analysis of the ethnic make-up and changes in our population, which based on enquiries, still seem for many people to be the most important aspect of the census,” Benjamin said.

However, he said the Bureau is certain that the report will be available this coming week.

Accordingly, a press conference will soon be called to discuss the results so far.

Given the re-organisation of topic dissemination, the Bureau plans to dedicate Compendium 3 exclusively to the Economic Activity component and analysis of the Labour Force in Guyana. The target dissemination date for Compendium 3 will also be indicated shortly.

“These apart, we have stopped our work on many occasions and generated customised information for numerous interest groups, ranging from agriculture to business to education to housing at regional and even at village level within regions. There is now a vast array of information in the public domain on Census 2012, being intensively utilised by some stakeholders, while others give a misleading impression that no final information has as yet been disseminated.”

The Bureau was able to release the first compendium in June.

“We did meet that commitment, so that in addition to the plethora of information from the preliminary report, Compendium 1 has been able to examine the national population growth and trends over censuses, the distribution of the population over regions, insights into the foreign-born component of our population, our analysis of the role and impact of immigration trends on the decline in our population size over censuses, among others,” Benjamin explained.

The preliminary report to which he referred was disseminated ever since June 2014.

“That report, though preliminary, contains a plethora of information on the population change since 2002 and before, the regional spread of the population, the gender spread, the populations of our urban townships, coastal/hinterland and importantly the growth in the country’s building stock, the utilisation of buildings between residential and business, the continued increase in the number of households in Guyana and the accompanying reduction in average household size, to highlight just a few factors in the widespread of information available. The Bureau was told by a major regional organisation that it had produced the most detailed preliminary report in the whole region,” Benjamin offered.