Raphael John-Lall

The 2011 Pop­u­la­tion and Hous­ing Cen­sus De­mo­graph­ic Re­port shows that Ro­man Catholi­cism was again the largest re­li­gious de­nom­i­na­tion with 285,671 fol­low­ers, but this rep­re­sents a de­cline from a mem­ber­ship of 289,711 in 2000, a de­crease of 1.4 per cent. Oth­er re­li­gious de­nom­i­na­tions that ex­pe­ri­enced de­creas­es in their mem­ber­ship in 2011 were Hin­duism, An­gli­can, Pres­by­ter­ian/Con­gre­ga­tion­al and Methodist.

The num­ber of per­sons claim­ing af­fil­i­a­tion to Pen­te­costal/Evan­gel­i­cal/Full Gospel more than dou­bled from 76,327 in 2000 to 159,033 in 2011, an in­crease of 108.4 per cent. The cat­e­go­ry "none" rose by 33.5 per cent and the "non stat­ed" con­sti­tut­ed quite a large num­ber of per­sons.

38.7% of pop­u­la­tion un­qual­i­fied

About 29.8 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion had at­tained pri­ma­ry lev­el ed­u­ca­tion. Pro­por­tions amount­ing to 43.5 per cent had at­tained sec­ondary and post-sec­ondary lev­els, with 6.2 per cent at­tain­ing ter­tiary non-uni­ver­si­ty ed­u­ca­tion and 8.4 per cent uni­ver­si­ty lev­el ed­u­ca­tion. Males out­num­ber fe­males up to the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els, but at the ter­tiary lev­els, fe­males out­num­ber males.

Rough­ly 38.7 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion had no qual­i­fi­ca­tion. In­clud­ed in this pro­por­tion are some per­sons who may not have writ­ten ex­am­i­na­tions to re­ceive qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Some 4.3 per cent re­port­ed school leav­ing as the high­est ed­u­ca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tion, while 25.1 per cent achieved GCE O Lev­el/CXC Gen­er­al Lev­el or A lev­els as their high­est ed­u­ca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

An­oth­er 9.3 per cent were grant­ed diplo­mas, five per cent achieved ei­ther a bach­e­lor's or mas­ter's de­gree and 0.2 per cent ma­tric­u­lat­ed to the doc­tor­al lev­el.

Women head 33% of house­holds

The re­port al­so showed that even though twice as many house­hold heads were men, the pro­por­tion of house­holds head­ed by fe­males was sub­stan­tial, at 33 per cent. The preva­lence of male-head­ed and fe­male-head­ed house­holds for each mu­nic­i­pal­i­ty.

In the city of Port-of-Spain, San Juan/Laven­tille, the city of San Fer­nan­do and in Diego Mar­tin, there was a greater preva­lence of fe­male-head­ed house­holds than in the oth­er mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties, no­tably Pe­nal/Debe, Ma­yaro/Rio Claro and Cou­va/ Tabaquite/Tal­paro, where male-head­ed house­holds tend­ed to be marked­ly more pre­dom­i­nant.

In T&T, two out of every three house­holds are head­ed by a male. In all the age groups from 20 to 24 years to 55 to 59 years, the ra­tio of male-head­ed to fe­male-head­ed house­holds was above the na­tion­al av­er­age.

Note­wor­thy is the case of the 80 years or old­er group, which is the on­ly in­stance of fe­male-head­ed house­holds out­num­ber­ing male-head­ed house­holds. Most of the males head­ing house­holds were be­tween the ages of 45 to 49 years while the ma­jor­i­ty of fe­male heads were 50 to 54 years.