THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is advancing preparations towards the conduct of house-to-house registration with the training of some 100 core trainers on Saturday, March 23, 2019.

“We have commenced our training of trainers session for house-to-house. We started this week training the core trainers that will eventually be selected to conduct training for the Assistant Registration Officers (AROs) as well as enumerators,” GECOM Public Relations Officer (PRO) Yolanda Ward said on Sunday.

Since March 3, 2019, the Elections Commission had placed advertisements in the newspapers requesting persons to apply to fill the temporary positions of AROs and enumerators for house-to-house registration.

At the interactive, two-day training exercise being conducted at Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE), participants are being taught the management of house-to-house registration which includes team-work and time management; code of conduct; the role of scrutineers; and organisational structure.

They are also learning the system of house-to-house registration which details not only with the process but why, how and where persons must register as well as source documents.

Reports and reporting, processing transactions and security arrangements were also among the other lessons delivered.

Those who will serve as ARO, clerk to the ARO and clerical assistants were also taught their duties and responsibilities.
The participants underwent a practical evaluation session conducted by the eight facilitators present.

At the end of the training, the participants should be able to understand the organisation structure that will facilitate the efficient conduct of house-to-house registration and be equipped with knowledge and skills to train officials for house-to-house registration.
They must also develop a variety of teaching methods for the delivery of topics and demonstrate competency in the presentation of content materials for house-to-house registration.

“The evaluation goes in terms of performance and it’s how the selection happens but we’re actually hoping to have teams of three with 25 teams so we’re looking at roughly about 75 persons to [conduct] country-wide training,” Ward said.

Should things progress as planned, Ward estimates that the country-wide training exercise will commence by next week while the actual process of house-to-house is expected to begin as early as June, 2019.