The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) yesterday initiated training for thousands of workers required for its new national house-to-house registration exercise, which could begin by mid-May.
“I anticipate that all things being equal, we can be in the field by mid-May/first week June for actual conduct of house-to-house registration,” GECOM’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Yolanda Ward told reporters yesterday.
Ward was speaking at the New Campbellville Secondary, which was one of the 16 locations across Georgetown where training is taking place. Other locations include Cummings Lodge Secondary, Sophia Primary, St Joseph High, East Ruimveldt Secondary, Charlestown Secondary and Houston Secondary.
The PRO explained that this weekend’s training sessions, which continue today, are expected to result in approximately 1,332 persons being train-ed to take up positions as enumerators and Assistant Registration Officers (AROs).
She noted that similar sessions will continue each weekend for the next six to eight weeks, following which “cluster offices” will be set up, from which field staff will operate under the direction of AROs, who will report to the 27 Registration Officers already employed by GECOM.
“This is first week of training we have started in Georgetown and next week we will move either to the East Bank or East Coast,” she said, before noting that there are currently 25 teams of trainers which are set to be deployed.
“There are 25 teams of three each but we only need 16 teams in George-town, so some teams are as large as five because we wanted to have all the trainers involved,” Ward explained.
She added that the trainers are those who passed last weekend’s evaluation and include many who have worked with GECOM before.
“We have a number of core trainers at GECOM who [last week] conducted training sessions with temporary trainers who will do routine training with ARO and enumerators. These are the successful persons from last weekend. They have also had a number of training sessions during the week. It is important to note that many of these trainers are not new. Some have worked with GECOM before for election training but needed to be made familiar with registration guidelines as outlined in National Registration Act,” Ward explained.
Ward noted that GECOM received more than 12,000 applications countrywide but it is only those who were shortlisted after the applications were audited that have been invited to train.
“We have a requirement that applications be signed and some applications do not have a signature,” Ward noted, before adding that these persons might have a second chance to apply if GECOM is forced to re-advertise. “We might have to do a double up training if at the end we don’t have a full complement passing the evaluation. We will have to advertise again and train again if that is the case,” she said.
