Despite Guyana’s unprecedented oil-fuelled economic growth, STEMGuyana co-founder and Executive Director Dr. Karen Abrams is warning that the country’s hinterland communities risk being left behind unless the Government makes greater investments in Indigenous communities, education, infrastructure and economic opportunities.
In her column, What the Oil Boom Owes the Hinterland, Abrams argues that while the coast has become the primary beneficiary of the country’s oil wealth, many interior communities continue to face entrenched poverty and limited access to essential services.
“There are two Guyanas, and the boom is mostly happening in one of them,” Abrams wrote.
She describes one Guyana as the narrow coastal strip where about 90 per cent of the population resides, “where the construction cranes rise, where the new hotels open, where the traffic thickens, and where almost every dollar of the oil economy first lands.” The other is the hinterland, home to most of Guyana’s Indigenous population, where communities remain connected to the coast largely by rivers, rough roads and expensive air travel.
Abrams’ concerns align with findings from several international development agencies that have cautioned that Guyana’s rapid economic expansion has not yet translated into broad-based prosperity.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) reported in 2025 that 58 per cent of Guyanese live in poverty, including 32 per cent in abject poverty, despite the country’s status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The figures have generated public discussion, with some local analysts contending that poverty may be even more widespread than the IDB estimates indicate.
Meanwhile, the joint Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and IDB report, Caribbean Development Dynamics 2025, identifies Indigenous peoples in Guyana as the country’s most economically disadvantaged population. It warns that persistent disparities between coastal and hinterland communities could accelerate migration from the interior to urban centres, placing additional pressure on coastal infrastructure while weakening Indigenous communities and local economies.
“If opportunity exists only on the coast, the interior will empty toward it, and both Guyanas will be poorer for the movement,” Abrams cautioned. “The coast will strain under arrivals it has not planned for. The hinterland will lose the people who hold its communities, cultures, and knowledge together.”
International institutions, including the IDB, OECD and World Bank, have consistently argued that Guyana’s long-term development will depend on ensuring that oil wealth translates into improved education, healthcare, infrastructure, connectivity and economic opportunities across the entire country, particularly in rural and hinterland communities.
Abrams believes education best illustrates the country’s unequal development.
She argues that children in hinterland and riverain communities continue to face obstacles rarely encountered by their counterparts on the coast, including shortages of trained teachers, unreliable electricity, poor internet connectivity and limited access to modern educational resources.
“A child in Region Eight has the same potential as a child in Georgetown,” she wrote. “What differs is everything around that potential… Talent is distributed evenly across this country. Opportunity is not.”
Drawing from personal experience, Abrams recalled that relatives raised in Guyana’s interior earned places at Queen’s College more than five decades ago, demonstrating that academic ability is not determined by geography.
Through STEMGuyana, she said she has witnessed similar potential after establishing learning pods in several hinterland communities. Although funding shortages forced the closure of seven centres, private sponsors later enabled some to reopen.
According to Abrams, those experiences demonstrate that investing in hinterland education is not charity but an investment in Guyana’s future workforce, leadership and economic development.
“Every child who gains access to quality education, technology, and mentorship strengthens the country’s future workforce, leadership, and capacity for innovation,” she wrote.
Abrams argues that Guyana’s oil revenues should be used to expand digital connectivity, improve electricity through community-scale solar systems, strengthen incentives to attract teachers to hinterland communities, and increase access to financing for entrepreneurs. She also sees agriculture, sustainable forestry, tourism and digital employment as sectors capable of creating opportunities closer to home, reducing migration to the coast.
Equally important, she contends, is ensuring that Indigenous communities become partners in shaping their own development.
“The hinterland is not separate from Guyana. It is Guyana,” Abrams wrote. “The people who live there are entitled to share fully in the opportunities created by the country’s oil wealth.”
She added that successful development depends upon respecting Indigenous voices, institutions, traditions and land rights.
“Development imposed on people rarely succeeds. Development designed and built with them often does.“
Abrams concludes that Guyana’s oil decade should not ultimately be judged by economic growth rates, government budgets or new infrastructure projects, but by whether children living in the country’s most remote villages enjoy greater opportunities by the end of the decade.
“The oil decade will be judged by many measures—growth rates, budgets, buildings,” she wrote. “Go to a village far from the coast at the end of this decade and look at what has changed for a twelve-year-old there… If the boom reaches her, it will have reached the country. If it does not, then much of what we built on the coast will have been built beside our greatest unfinished work, not on top of it.”
Her conclusion encapsulates the central message of the commentary:
“Two Guyanas entered this decade. The work of the decade is to leave it as one.”
