Photo: Milton Grant, United Nations

Researchers at ECLAC and UNICEF produced an electronic resource –also available in print- entitled Counting everyone. Toolkit for the inclusion of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants in population and housing censuses, which outlines the rights, experiences and lessons learned, and challenges of producing accurate and up-to-date data on indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This publication is divided into five modules and it aims to support and guide national statistics offices and indigenous and Afro-descendant organizations themselves in this area.

The toolkit is part of a cooperation agreement between the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE) - Population Division of ECLAC and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). It is also part of the ECLAC and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) work programme, which is supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

“Latin America is a region with enormous cultural diversity, in which there are more than 670 indigenous peoples and a significant Afro-descendant population. This diversity is also evident within these groups, in terms of demographic, territorial and socio-political patterns,” explains the Executive Secretary of ECLAC, Alicia Bárcena, in the prologue.

“Despite their heterogeneity, these peoples share an unacceptable reality of structural discrimination due to historical processes of colonization, conquest and the expansion of Republican States. Today, this discrimination is in the form of greater levels of poverty and marginalization and it is recognized as a clear violation of human rights,” she adds.

Through CELADE-Population Division, ECLAC has developed a number of activities focused on the sociodemographic analysis of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, proposing recommendations for policies.

The toolkit, which is available to support the 2010 round of censuses which are being carried out in the region, aims “to produce systematic and up-to-date knowledge of the different conceptual and operative aspects of a census and its relationship with an ethnic approach, by carrying out minimum recommendations to improve the quality of the information.”

The first module deals with indigenous peoples’ and Afro-descendants’ rights to information, by identifying some urgent requirements in Latin America and the Caribbean, while the second module examines in depth the participation of these groups in population censuses.

In the third module, the experts answer the question, “Who are indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants?” by examining conceptual and methodological aspects of ethnic identification in censuses.

The fourth module outlines the pilot tests which have been carried out up until now, not only by national statistics offices, but also by civil society organizations, to include indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. Finally, the last module focuses on why it is important to disseminate census results related to ethnic groups and also to promote their use as an expression of the right to information.