 Hello and welcome to Interview, production of the Government Information Service. I am Jolene Beset-Joseph. Census 2020 has been launched, but what does that mean for the general public at large? Well, to tell us a little bit more about Census 2020 and how it will affect everybody, I am actually joined by Mr Edwin St. Catherine, who is a consultant at the Central Statistical Office. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, and it's very good to be, you know, listened to by the general public on your broadcast. All right. Now, first of all, can you very broadly just remind us of what a census actually is? Okay. A census is a total counting of all dwelling units, households, buildings, persons in the country. All right. We use many different concepts to measure these various components of the census. The bottom line is that you are counting the people and also their characteristics, male, female, religion, migration, education, and all of these associated characteristics. Okay. And what are the benefits of doing this activity? Okay. So there are many benefits to it. One fairly significant and glaring issue that faces St. Lucian now is the reform of the constituency boundaries. Within our constitution, we technically, each constituency should be about the same size. But over the years, there are great disparities. For example, between Denry South and Grosile, you see Grosile's population north of 28,000. You see Denry South around 5,000 in terms of electors. Okay. So that sort of disparity exists most egregiously in that case. But in many other cases, the castries constituencies are significantly larger than the rural ones because of rural to urban migration that has occurred in the last few decades. Okay. All right. Now census 2020, as I said, has been launched now. So people can expect, I guess, to see representatives coming around and collecting data. How, first of all, can we, especially in the era we live in now, how can we actually be able to distinguish between the laymen and the people that will be coming around to be collecting the data when they come to your home? All enumerators, supervisors, area supervisors, district coordinators will be issued with an official ID card. And they will also be able, we will also have a hotline that people can call to validate the credentials of the person that has come to visit them. We do now have a mapping exercise on the ground that started off with an issue with an ID card, whereas the people who were credentialed, they did not have a full ID. So we've remedied that situation and going forward, everybody will be fully identifiable to members of the public. Okay. All right. And how long exactly will the activity go on for? Because as I said again, it's just been launched, but how long can we expect people to be coming around? Okay. The first initial set of activities that are occurring in the next, in the months leading to the census, the census officially starts in the middle of May, 12th of May. And then it continues from the 12th of May intensively for three months. But prior to this, from now till the 12th of May, well technically it should be finished by like mid-April, we are going to be geo-referencing every building on the island. So every building on the island. So we have deployed some 30 persons to engage in that activity. We want to know where all the buildings are and we want to classify the buildings in terms of whether it contains residential units, dwelling units, businesses, institutions, meaning it's a hotel or it's a prison or it's an institution, a public hospital and so on. Whether it's another public building like health centers and so on. We want to classify all the buildings firstly on the island and then when the census starts more intensively then we will send the enumerators out to all of the buildings to document their contents. Okay. Dwelling units, households, persons, even persons in St. Lucia at the time who do not live in St. Lucia. Oh. Yes. So there are two classes of persons, right? There are two ways that the census is defined. It's defined via what is called a desuray process where you count usual residents that these are people who have been in St. Lucia for over a year and intend to make St. Lucia their home for the next year. So those are the usual residents. Then there are those persons who are here temporarily. Okay. Okay. Most people would be interested in the desuray or usually resident population. Okay. But you have to also be able to account for the additional ad hoc part of the population that are residents in hotels and things like that. Okay. Brilliant. Okay. All right. All right. But we're going to take a short break now. Yes. When we come back I want to go more into detail about what people can expect in the questions. Okay. As I said, we're just going to take a short break. We'll be back in a moment. One of the eight universally accepted rights of the consumer is the right to safety. This means that consumers must have the right to be protected against products, production processes and services which are hazardous to life or health. Such products and services must meet established national standards. These standards give the consumers the assurance that the product is safe for use or consumption. Welcome back to interview. I am joined here today by Mr. Edwin St. Catherine and we are talking Census 2020. Now, before we went to the break, Mr. St. Catherine, I was saying to you that just so people can get an idea of the kind of questions they would be asked to answer, could you just give us a brief, some brief insight into what they can expect? Okay. So we cover housing or dwelling unit characteristics like if you are a renter, how much rent do you pay per month? So we get a distribution of the payments of rents around the island. We will also look at the issue of overcrowding. So we look at the number of rooms in the dwelling unit relative to the population and compute the amount of difficulty or deprivation the household has with respect to being overcrowded. We look at crime, especially those occurring in the last 12 months that will allow us to rank all the communities in terms of relative safety with respect to crimes against persons like an assault versus crime against your property like somebody steal your car's tires. So we look at that. We will look at household assets. We will look also, one major move away from the last census is that we are looking at a reference person rather than a household head. household heads tend to have a male dominance phenomenon built into it. So to avoid that bias, we do like the international recommendations suggesting that we do that. We look at internal migration, very important. We look at disability is a very significant one. That's the only place you really get best information on disabled persons in the population. Okay. Very important. We look at unemployment, economic activity. We look of course at income. It's a little bit of, for some people an uncomfortable question and of course fertility. How fertile is the population? Our population has not been too fertile quote unquote because our fertility rate is been 1.6 persons per fertile woman that is a woman between the age of 15 and 50. So it means our population maybe, when we count it, it may be depressed. Okay. Now you were talking there about, I think when you mentioned economics, you even said that that might be a subject a lot of people might not want to discuss. Can we just, can we touch on confidentiality of the information collected? This is going to be totally confidential where the information is collected, right? Yeah. For the census to be done, the law has to be passed, okay, protecting the census data set, okay, especially the individual records. So the census office cannot reveal any individual's record, right? It is protected by law. The census office itself can be sued if that information comes to light. The individual in particular can be sued because we make them sign an oath of secrecy, okay? So we take very, very seriously the confidentiality of this information. Of course there are, I think there's going to be an issue with after one, after, I don't know, 65 to 75 years, the record exists, whether you put it in the archive and make it available to your descendants, the U.S. does that and I think that is something that we probably should be pursuing in the future so that our descendants can review where they came from. I understand. Okay, all right. So I want to touch on very quickly because we are right now at the time, is I know that a new system is being brought in for us to help us to accumulate all the data and such on the CAPI system. Yes. Tell us a little bit about why that system is being brought in and basically how it's going to help in the collection of data. Okay, it's going to enable the census to be geo-referenced. A lot of what we do now is based on Google Maps and all of that, so we leverage a lot of that technology, we leverage tablet technology, satellite technology, the fact that a lot of satellite maps are geo-referenced and we'll collect the data to a geo-referenced point so that if you have a community project and you want to know how the residents within one mile of that community project are affected by that project, you can pull up the data on just that portion of the community. Early census data would be published by enumeration area or the whole community and not by portions of it and so on, but by geo-enabling the census you have the possibility of doing a lot better small area statistics in terms of location of health facilities, schools, business places and all of that. Okay. So that is the core of the argument for that approach. Okay, all right. And I believe in some respects it actually helps with the whole confidentiality thing as well I guess. It doesn't have to go through so many people, right? Right. It does not have to be manually entered, the data is not on paper, so you don't have two copies lying around. We sync it via a secure link between the tablet and the cloud and the data is stored in a secure location, HTTPS, same sort of link that you use for your bank account. Brilliant. Okay, all right. Now we have run out of time, sorry to say, but before I go, is there anything you would like to say to the general public? Because as I said to you, it's an activity that obviously cannot be done if they are not part of it. So what would you say to them to ensure to them that this is something we really must be taking part in? Cooperation of the general public is key to a successful census. The greater the level of participation in a census, the more successful it is. Okay, so it is one of the most, it is one event that incorporates every single person. Everyone is included, right? So the cooperation of the general public in allowing us to get all this important information is significant and is key to its success. Okay. All right, brilliant. All right. Thank you, Catherine. And I hope the census goes wonderfully. It would be good to have you back again actually to talk to you later, maybe about... No problem at all. Okay. No problem. We've been doing some testing and all of that so I can always give an update. Brilliant. All right. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for the interview. Stay tuned to the National Television Network. Bye-bye for now.