Georgetown, GINA, February 25, 2004

Preliminary results of the National Housing and Census Exercise, conducted in September 2002, will be officially handed over to the Minister of Finance, Sasenarine Kowlessar tomorrow.
The report will then be presented to Cabinet. The public will be notified of the findings shortly.
The census exercise is the total review and assessment of the full profile of the population and building stock.
The preliminary count, among other things, will provide information on Guyana’s population by gender, region, households, institutions, location, ethnicity, economic activity and education.
Information gathered on each person could determine and garner useful cross-sector correlation data that can be used nationally, regionally and internationally.
In addition to the completion of Guyana’s preliminary census exercise for this year, the United Nations-funded round of population and housing census conducted globally will be completed.
The census exercise is monitoring of the population at a particular period of time. This includes local and foreign persons who are in a country at that time.
Monitoring of the population was grouped under two broad headings - institutional population and non-institutional population. The last census exercise in Guyana was done over ten years ago.
The Bureau of Standards, the agency responsible for the exercise, is hoping to conduct a media information workshop before the preliminary results are released, to sensitise the media to the usefulness and the interpretation of information from the exercise.
Additionally, the Bureau hopes to launch its website where all results from the census will be available.