What the Oil Boom owes the Hinterland

Jun 21, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

Dr. Karen Abrams writes a weekly column on technology, education, and economics. She is the co-founder of the STEMGuyana and Pathway Online Academy afterschool programs.

(Kaieteur News) – There are two Guyanas, and the boom is mostly happening in one of them.

The first Guyana is the coast. Ninety percent of our population lives there, on the narrow strip 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 second Guyana is the hinterland. The vast interior that makes up most of our national territory, home to most of our Indigenous people, and connected to the coastal boom by rivers, rough roads, and expensive flights.

The joint OECD and Inter-American Development Bank report on Caribbean development makes an observation about our country that deserves far more attention than it has received. Indigenous Guyanese, roughly ten percent of our population and residing mostly in hinterland areas, remain the most economically disadvantaged group in the country. The same report warns that in countries like Guyana, Belize, and Suriname, rural-to-urban migration driven by uneven development could significantly alter the social and economic landscape within a generation. In plain language, if opportunity exists only on the coast, the interior will empty toward it, and both Guyanas will be poorer for the movement. 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.

I think about this through the lens of education because that is where the gap shows earliest and cuts deepest. The reported drivers of our national dropout crisis include unequal access to quality instruction in hinterland and riverain areas. A child in Region Eight has the same potential as a child in Georgetown. What differs is everything around that potential. The trained teachers willing to stay, the connectivity that makes modern learning possible and the electricity that keeps a school functioning. The pathway that connects finishing school to a livelihood that does not require leaving home and talent is distributed evenly across this country. Opportunity is not.

I know this personally. More than fifty years ago, cousins of mine who were born and raised in the interior sat the Common Entrance examination and earned places at Queen’s College, then and now one of Guyana’s most prestigious secondary schools. Their success was not unusual because of where they came from. It was proof that children from the hinterland possess the same intellectual ability, determination, and potential as children anywhere else in Guyana. What they require is opportunity.

Over the years, through STEMGuyana, I have seen that same potential repeatedly. We established learning pods in communities across the country, including several in the interior. Funding challenges forced us to close seven of those hinterland learning pods, disrupting educational opportunities for children who often have few alternatives. Fortunately, private sponsors stepped forward and enabled us to reopen some of them. Their support demonstrates an important lesson: targeted investments in hinterland education are not acts of charity. They are investments in Guyana’s human capital and future prosperity.

More private-sector organisations should view these opportunities in the same way. The benefits extend beyond individual villages and regions. Every child who gains access to quality education, technology, and mentorship strengthens the country’s future workforce, leadership, and capacity for innovation.

This is also where non-governmental organisations continue to play a unique role. Government remains essential and carries responsibilities that no other institution can fulfill. But NGOs often operate differently. They are typically able to innovate more quickly, experiment with new approaches, focus intensely on outcomes, and adapt when something is not working. Because they depend on donors and sponsors, they are often required to monitor and evaluate programs closely and demonstrate measurable impact. Limited resources also force them to be careful stewards of every dollar spent. Some of Guyana’s most effective educational and social interventions have emerged through partnerships between NGOs, communities, and private sector organisations working together.

The hinterland is not separate from Guyana. It is Guyana. The people who live there are entitled to share fully in the opportunities created by the country’s oil wealth. What the boom owes the hinterland is not charity, but investment and inclusion.

Connectivity comes first, because in 2026 a satellite link and a charged device can place the world’s knowledge in a village school, and the cost of doing so has never been lower. Reliable energy, increasingly achievable through community-scale solar systems, must follow. Teachers should be supported with training, housing, and compensation that makes hinterland service a respected career path rather than a sacrifice. Access to financing is equally important, creating opportunities for entrepreneurship and economic development within communities rather than offering only a one-way ticket to the coast. Agriculture, sustainable forestry, tourism, and digital work all have the potential to create prosperity closer to home.

Most importantly, hinterland communities must be partners in shaping their own future. Their voices, institutions, traditions, and land rights must be respected. Development imposed on people rarely succeeds. Development designed and built with them often does.

I have seen what hinterland young people do when the door opens even slightly. Given the same tools and the same instruction, they perform with the same brilliance as any child anywhere. The deficit was never in the children. It was in what we put within their reach.

The oil decade will be judged by many measures. Growth rates, budgets, buildings. Let me offer one more, and I would argue it is the truest of them all. 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. Her school, her connection to the world and her sense of what she is allowed to become without leaving everything she loves. 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.

Two Guyanas entered this decade. The work of the decade is to leave it as one.

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• hinterland, Inter-American Development Bank, Karen Abrams, Oil boom

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