Who Is Studying Guyana?

Sep 13, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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In a country changing this quickly, governing by instinct is no longer good enough

By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana is changing faster than at perhaps any other period in our modern history. Our economy is expanding, communities are growing, migration is reshaping the labour market, billions of dollars are being spent on infrastructure and new industries are emerging. Yet at precisely the moment when we most need to understand what is happening to us, I find myself asking a simple question: Who is studying Guyana?

Data and research are sometimes treated as academic concerns, but they are instruments of development, particularly in a developing country where resources remain limited and mistakes are expensive. Businesses need reliable information about population, income, consumption and skills to decide where to invest. Government needs even more. How many secondary-school places will Region Four require five years from now? Where should the next hospital be built? How many nurses, teachers, engineers and technicians will Guyana need in 2035? Which communities are growing fastest? Where is poverty declining? Which diseases are increasing, among whom and where? Without reliable data, planning becomes intuition with a budget attached.

What makes our situation particularly interesting is that Guyana clearly has the ability to produce timely data when we decide something is important enough to measure. GDP, inflation, trade and other economic indicators are regularly reported. We know an extraordinary amount about the performance of our economy. But how much do we know about the performance of our society?

Consider a question that should matter enormously in an ethnically diverse country. How are economic opportunities distributed among Guyanese? What proportion of government-supported business loans is applied for by, approved for or rejected among Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, Indigenous Guyanese and mixed Guyanese? What is the ethnic distribution of state land allocations, scholarships, government contracts, homeownership or business ownership?

I am not suggesting that these data necessarily exist and are deliberately being hidden. In some cases ethnicity may not be recorded, and individual privacy must always be protected. My question is more fundamental: How does a multi-ethnic society objectively determine whether development is inclusive if it does not measure outcomes?

Education raises similar questions. For years I have been studying whatever education data I can access, yet some of the information required to understand whether children are actually learning remains difficult to find. What percentage of Grade Two children can read and perform Mathematics at the expected level? How many have caught up by Grade Four? How do outcomes differ across regions and schools? Are the gaps closing? Most importantly, what decisions are being made because of what the assessments reveal?

The same standard should apply to the programmes receiving significant public investment. What is the measurable effectiveness of the Guyana Digital School? How many students regularly use it, and what happens to their academic performance? What are the outcomes of Board of Industrial Training programmes? How many participants enter, complete training, gain certification and subsequently find employment?

There is an even more important question. If significant numbers of children struggle with literacy and numeracy through primary school and some subsequently leave secondary school without strong academic foundations, what happens when those young people enter technical and vocational programmes? Do they thrive? Do they struggle? Do they drop out? Which interventions allow them to succeed? We cannot acknowledge serious foundational-learning problems and then assume that technical training somehow erases them. The data should tell us what happens.

Healthcare demonstrates even more dramatically why this matters. Recently, I found myself wondering whether the number of Guyanese dying from cancer, particularly people I consider relatively young, was unusually high. I immediately recognised the weakness of my own observation. Guyana is small and social media connects us. Perhaps I simply hear about deaths that would once have occurred outside my awareness. My instinct might be completely wrong. That is precisely why we need data.

A facebook friend subsequently pointed me to an important 2026 study by Diana Elizabeth Khan and Paul Abiodun Olaiya examining 8,822 Guyana National Cancer Registry records from 2015 to 2024. Registered cancer cases increased from 525 in 2015 to 1,635 in 2024.

That does not mean cancer incidence tripled. The researchers caution that improved identification and registration may explain part of the increase, although genuine increases may also have occurred. But other findings deserve attention. Overall case fatality among registered cases was 53.8 percent. Prostate cancer led among men and breast cancer among women, followed by cervical cancer. Most strikingly, cancer stage was unknown for 73.6 percent of the records, while 19 percent had missing or unusable regional information.

Those gaps matter. Without reliable geographic information, how do we investigate whether cancer hot spots exist? Without adequate staging data, how do we know whether Guyanese are being diagnosed earlier and whether interventions are working?

The Ministry of Health clearly recognises cervical cancer as a serious public-health problem. Screening campaigns and vouchers demonstrate that government is responding, and that deserves acknowledgement. But why shouldn’t the evidence informing those interventions become part of the public conversation? Tell women what the data show. Which ages are most affected? Are rates changing? Where? Is screening increasing? Are cancers being detected earlier? Good data can persuade people to act.

Interestingly, Guyanese researchers were asking some of these questions long ago. A cancer study published in 2009 examined ethnic patterns in breast, cervical and prostate cancers and concluded that socioeconomic, dietary, genetic and environmental influences warranted further investigation. Seventeen years later, the authors of the 2026 study still describe population-level cancer data from Guyana as sparse.

Perhaps Guyana does not suffer from an absence of data as much as fragmented collection, inconsistent record keeping, delayed publication, limited public access and an insufficient culture of converting administrative records into knowledge.

Government agencies collect enormous amounts of information every day. Children attend schools. Patients enter hospitals. Businesses register. Citizens apply for loans and house lots. People pay taxes, cross borders, give birth and die. With appropriate privacy protections, aggregated and anonymised information from these activities can become an extraordinary national research resource.

Data should not be feared because they reveal problems. Evidence showing that a programme is failing is not an attack on the government that created it. It is an opportunity to fix the programme. Likewise, evidence showing that an intervention is succeeding should be published proudly and independently verified.

Guyana should be one of the most fascinating development laboratories in the world today. A small developing country has suddenly become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. We should be studying what happens to poverty, inequality, education, health, migration, wages, housing, entrepreneurship and social mobility during that transformation.

Universities should be studying it. Government should be studying it. Independent researchers and the private sector should be studying it. Wherever possible, anonymised data should be available for others to study as well.

Twenty years from now, researchers should not have to reconstruct this extraordinary period from newspaper reports, political speeches and people’s memories. We should be measuring Guyana while Guyana is changing.

We already know, with remarkable precision, how much oil Guyana produces and how quickly our GDP is growing. We should be equally curious about what is happening to the people who live here.

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• Guyana resources, Karen Abrams, labour market, Studying Guyana

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