Accra, March 20, GNA - Listing of structures and housing units for the 2000 Population and Housing Census begins throughout the country today.

These include enumeration of institutional populations, that is, inmates of rehabilitation centres, mental homes, hospitals, clinics, prisons and borstal homes and police cells.

Others are military camps, training institutions of the police and the military, para-military training institutions, boarding homes, orphanages and homes for the destitute.

Outlining the schedule of activities on the Census, Mr Sam Akurang Wiafe, Secretary to the Census Secretariat, said fishermen who will likely be at sea and persons in field camps would be enumerated.

The 2000 Population and Housing Census takes off at mid-night on March 26th, 2000. The formal launching of the event is on March 25th. He said on the night of March 26, there would be radio and television broadcasts, bonfires and fire cracker displays.

"There will be enumeration of persons staying in hotels, rest-houses, transit quarters. These will take place between 9.00 p.m. and 12 midnight". Also to be counted are out-door sleepers and the mentally sick, beggars, vagrants at lorry parks, railway stations, in front of shops and bus stops seen after midnight and before dawn.

There will be enumeration of people at airports, bus stops, railway stations, harbours and ferries at the country's borders. Mr Wiafe said March 27 to April Nine would see the start of enumeration of household populations.

A household consists of a group of persons who live together in the same housing unit, share the same housekeeping arrangements and are catered for as one unit. Thus, members of a household need not to be related by blood or marriage.

He said Census officers are the officially accredited persons of the National Census Secretariat who will be counting all the people in Ghana, adding that this includes all foreigners living in Ghana at the time.

"They can be recognised in their white T-Shirts marked Census Officer, and other inscriptions, with ID cards".