Reforming Caribbean Census-Taking Initiatives in Response to Contemporary Local and Global Threats in the 21st Century

The modern Caribbean Census is at least 60 years old and has run out of steam. Yet census-taking or some variant of it is imperative in fueling the needs of development planning regionally. In the 2020s, the social, cultural, administrative, economic, and environmental realities of the Anglophone Caribbean have adversely threatened traditional modes of census-taking. Thus, Caribbean census-taking has transcended the practices of the early 1960s, except for minor changes despite the prevalence of the 1960s model.

This paper strives to consider innovative census-taking strategies that are cognizant of the realities that prevail in the 2020s. It reinforces a reliance upon critical insights that thrive on demographic theory, mathematical and statistical modelling, and a host of secondary data sources that permit the collection of data on live births, deaths, and international migration.

A range of problems that negatively impact development policy agenda abound and prevail as ignorant technocrats and policy-makers continue to proffer uninformed claims about national population dynamic to the detriment of national planning for policy agendas. Having heard and listened to the woes of statisticians in several Anglophone Caribbean territories that have conducted the 2020 Round of Censuses, a set of woes have exacerbated census-taking challenges and warrant valid introspection and redress in the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This paper is informed by the author’s encounters, reflections, and recommendations based on his professional experiences in achieving some measure of equilibrium between the provision of census data and the attainment of national development agendas.