SIB Launches Labour Force Survey Across Belize This Weekend

Personnel from the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB) will be out in the field as of this weekend for the second round of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for 2025. The survey, which is SIB’s signature tool for collecting employment data, will begin on Sunday, September 7, and will last four weeks. The survey gathers data on persons within the labour force who are both employed and unemployed but seeking employment. For employed persons in the workforce, the survey collects data such as the fields they work in and their hours of work. For those outside the workforce, it gathers data on the reasons why people are not seeking employment. Annia Mejia, Statistician 1 with the SIB, spoke on how the survey sampling works and how the public can identify SIB personnel in the field. 

Annia Mejia, Statistician, SIB: “So you can expect to see someone in the field  bearing a  S.I.B.  t-shirt which means they will have a white t-shirt with the S.I.B. logo on the front. And they will also carry with them a S.I.B. identification card which has the logo as well as it bears the signature of the Director General, Ms. Diana Castillo. They will also have a tablet on hand and If you need more assurance that it’s a LFS member you can also look to see the SIB vehicle, it will either have the logo on the door or it will have some type of emblem in the windshield. And then if you still need assurance that this is an LFS member you can always  call the office to verify that this person that’s visiting your house is supposed to be at your house collecting your data. For this survey we have a sample of 3,000 randomly selected households and it’s across the country. So we’ll have six teams, one team per district and each team will have like a field supervisor and about three to five interviewers on the team and these teams will be going across different areas in their respective districts collecting information from the different households that were selected in the sample. So it’s very random. It’ll be random areas, for example, like for sure I know we selected San Pedro so about four random years in San Pedro for example and you’ll expect to see a team out there visiting randomly selected households in those areas.” 

The LFS is done twice a year, once in April and again in September, to account for changes in seasonal employment. Data from the last LFS showed that Belize had an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent, which was down from 3 percent in April 2024.