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Sunday Essay · Diaspora Bonds & Development Finance

A letter to Guyana at sixty, written in Brooklyn, on the week its President told the diaspora to come home and its Finance Minister told residents to go abroad.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · May 30, 2026

I. Two Instructions, One Rostrum

In the space of a single week, from a single rostrum, the Government of Guyana issued two instructions to two audiences, and asked no one to notice that they pointed in opposite directions.

On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May, the country’s sixtieth Independence Day, President Irfaan Ali stood at the National Stadium at Providence beside Barbados’ Mia Mottley and told the diaspora that their hour had come. The Government would launch, within a week, a special diaspora bond to raise money from Guyanese abroad for public infrastructure at home. “Here is your opportunity,” he said, “to make your contribution and be part of the massive transformation taking place in our country.” Come home. Bring your money home.

Three days later, before the Private Sector Commission’s annual meeting at the Marriott, Finance Minister Ashni Singh addressed the Guyanese who never left. He urged them to look outward, to position themselves beyond the domestic market, to seek a presence in regional and international economies as the foreign investors flocking to Guyana had done.^[12] Go abroad. Take your money out.

To the Guyanese in Queens and Brooklyn and Toronto: invest in Guyana. To the Guyanese in Georgetown and Berbice: invest somewhere else. This is not, on its face, a coherent theory of national development. It is two slogans facing away from each other, and the gap between them is where the real economy lives.

GBJ Data Note: In the same week, the President announced a diaspora bond to attract foreign Guyanese capital, while the Finance Minister urged resident businesses to seek opportunities abroad — two instructions pointing in opposite directions.

Supply a feeling where the figures belong, and you are not issuing a bond. You are passing a collection plate with the word “bond” printed on the rim.

II. The Home Market, as It Actually Is

Begin with the half of the instruction that strains hardest against the evidence. The Minister asks resident firms to take their ambitions overseas. Why might a Guyanese business owner, in the middle of the fastest economic expansion on earth, be told to look elsewhere for room to grow?

Guyana has recorded unprecedented economic expansion, registering the world’s highest real GDP growth rates over multiple consecutive years, including 63.3% in 2022, 33.0% in 2023, and 43.8% in 2024.^[1][10] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects a further 19.3% growth in 2025 and 16.2% in 2026.^[2][3]

The local press has been answering that question for some time, and not quietly. Eight days before the Minister spoke, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) — not an opposition pamphlet, but the establishment voice of the domestic private sector — issued a formal statement warning of an increasing trend of local enterprises being bypassed by multinational corporations across the expanding sectors.^[11] Local participation, the Chamber said, must not be circumvented. That is the language of an institution watching its members lose ground in their own country.

The Government’s rejoinder is the Local Content Act, and it is not a weak one. The 2021 legislation channelled an estimated US$743 million to Guyanese firms in 2024 alone, up from US$520 million in 2023 and US$320 million in 2022.^[7][8] Over 1,300 Guyanese firms are now registered under the Act.^[9] The Chamber’s own past leadership has called it a game-changer. This is true, and it matters.

But a headline figure is not a distribution, and an aggregate is not an answer to the question a Kaieteur columnist put plainly in mid-May, surveying the foreign executives and the rising cost of a family’s groceries: jobs, jobs, jobs — but who is doing them? Local content has carved out a managed lane for Guyanese capital in the petroleum value chain. The Minister’s counsel to look outward may be perfectly prudent in itself — small open economies from Singapore to Ireland have grown rich by sending their firms into the world, and there is no shame in the ambition of a Guyanese conglomerate with a regional footprint. But prudence does not dissolve the timing, and the timing raises an uncomfortable question. Why is international diversification being urged at the precise moment of unprecedented domestic growth — and in the same fortnight that the country’s own Chamber of Commerce warns that local firms are being elbowed out of the home market? The counsel may be sound. What it cannot be, set beside the Chamber’s warning, is innocent of the question it raises about how much room the boom has actually left for Guyanese at home.

GBJ Data Note: The Local Content Act channelled US$743 million to Guyanese firms in 2024 — yet in the same fortnight, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce warned that local enterprises were being bypassed by multinationals across the expanding sectors.

III. The Bond, and the Missing Prospectus

Now the other half — and here this Journal must declare an interest, because we have been asking the question for a year. In June of last year, in conversation with Dr. Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan, the Henry George Chair in Economics at St. John’s University, we put what then seemed a hypothetical: can diaspora bonds work for Guyana?^[15] This week the President answered the prior question — whether Guyana would issue one at all — and in doing so converted our hypothetical into an urgent practical matter. The question is no longer whether. It is how.

On the how, the diaspora bond is, in principle, one of the better ideas in the development-finance toolkit; the diaspora is exactly the under-mobilised national asset this Journal has long said it was. The instinct is sound. The execution, so far, is an announcement in search of an instrument — and on the evidence to date, the search has not begun.

Consider what the President did not say — and what, a week later, the Government still has not said. There is no prospectus. No size, no coupon, no tenor, no eligibility rule, no schedule of the projects the money would build, no jurisdiction in which a wronged bondholder could go to court. The bond was announced on Independence Day with a launch promised “within one week.” The week has come and gone. No bond has launched, and not one term has appeared. A government that planned a Diamond Jubilee to the minute set itself a seven-day deadline, let it pass, and has yet to publish a single page of terms. The diaspora has been asked to fund a transformation before being told the rate at which it would be repaid or the works its savings would underwrite. “Here is your opportunity” did not arrive before the prospectus. It arrived instead of one.

The thing that separates an investment from a levy is a prospectus. An investment is a contract. A levy is a demand for money backed by nothing but belonging.

This is not a pedantic complaint; it is the entire matter. In any regulated market, soliciting the public for a security with no offering document is not an oversight to be tidied up later; it is something a licensed broker would be barred from doing. The state is asking of its own diaspora precisely what the law would forbid anyone to ask of a stranger: send the money now, read the terms — if ever — afterward. Supply a feeling where the figures belong, and you are not issuing a bond. You are passing a collection plate with the word “bond” printed on the rim.

We have, moreover, the Government’s own earlier words to measure this against. In January, discussing amendments to the local-content framework, the President spoke of structured models offering predictable, even guaranteed, fixed returns to citizens and diaspora investors in the oil and gas value chain. The vocabulary then was precision. The vocabulary in May was patriotism. The same Government that negotiates precise terms with its oil partners offers its own people abroad a slogan. The specifics did not simply go missing; they were withheld — and the diaspora is being asked to supply the difference out of faith.

Nor was the bond the only such instrument unveiled from that stage. In the same breath, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced the Trident Arrow Investment Fund, a bilateral vehicle through which ordinary Guyanese and Barbadians would invest in utilities, technology, and agri-processing.^[26] Two capital-raising instruments were launched as announcements that night. Neither was launched as a contract. The pattern is not incidental to one bond; it is becoming a habit of how the State asks its people for money.

And we have, further, the record of the Government that preceded this one. The Alliance For Change (AFC), in its 2011 Action Plan, included among its diaspora policy commitments a specific pledge to “mobilise Diaspora investors” to upgrade the health services sector and make re-migration more attractive — Item 6 of the Diaspora Policy chapter, on page 31 of that document.^[24] These were not vague aspirations; they were numbered commitments in a published programme. When the APNU+AFC coalition came to power in 2016, those commitments came with it. They did not become policy.

GBJ Data Note: The AFC’s 2011 Action Plan (Item 6, p. 31) formally committed to mobilising diaspora investors — a pledge that accompanied the APNU+AFC coalition into government in 2016 and was never acted upon.

IV. What the Record Actually Teaches

Diaspora bonds are not an experiment, and they are not a guaranteed success either. Israel has issued them since 1951 through the Development Corporation for Israel and has raised, by recent count, more than US$54 billion — a sustained, institutionalised relationship between a state and its scattered people.^[4] India has turned to the instrument repeatedly in moments of macroeconomic stress: US$1.6 billion in the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, a further US$4.2 billion through Resurgent India Bonds in 1998, and US$5.5 billion via India Millennium Deposits in 2000.^[5][14]

But for every Israel or India, there is a Pakistan, whose 2019 diaspora bond (the Pakistan Banao Certificates) set out to raise US$1 billion and brought in a mere US$26 million — less than three cents on the intended dollar.^[6] Pakistan did not lack patriots, and it did not lack a diaspora. What it lacked was preparation, a clear purpose, and a governance record its expatriates were willing to trust. The gap between the Israeli outcome and the Pakistani one is the entire subject of this essay.

GBJ Data Note: Pakistan’s 2019 Pakistan Banao Certificates targeted US$1 billion and raised US$26 million — less than 3 cents on the dollar. The failure was not a lack of diaspora; it was a lack of institutional trust.

Guyana’s own domestic record adds a third dimension to that gap: the gap between proposal and action. A formal diaspora bond proposal was put to President David Granger’s administration during the 2016–2020 APNU+AFC coalition period. The response, as those who were present have described it, was “Hold and Wait.”^[25] The country waited. The oil began to flow. The window that a first-mover government might have used to build the institutional architecture — the legal framework, the regulatory registration, the trust-building with diaspora communities before the money was urgently needed — was not opened. Five years of preparation were not taken. The current administration inherited not only the oil revenues but also the institutional deficit that the “Hold and Wait” posture left behind. The President’s Independence Day announcement is, in this light, not a beginning. It is a resumption — and a resumption that carries the weight of two administrations’ worth of deferred institutional work.

It was precisely that gap Dr. Gevorkyan pressed upon us a year ago.^[15] A diaspora bond, he argued, rests on three pillars — identity, trust, and infrastructure — and the order is not incidental. Identity is what makes a Guyanese in Richmond Hill or Tooting feel addressed by the offer at all. Trust is what persuades her that the money will be spent as promised and repaid as scheduled. Infrastructure — institutional, legal, financial; distinct from the roads and hospitals the bond would fund — is the machinery that makes the first two credible rather than merely sentimental. “A diaspora bond,” he told us, “is not just a loan. It is a promise.” And a promise, one must add, is worth exactly the record of the party who makes it.

The scholarly literature says the same thing in a colder register. The seminal World Bank study by Suhas Ketkar and Dilip Ratha is unsentimental about the conditions.^[13] Yes, there is a “patriotic discount”: diaspora investors will accept a lower return than the market demands, out of attachment to the country of origin. That discount is real, and it is largest among first-generation migrants — exactly the cohort of older Guyanese the bond will court most effectively. The patriotic discount is the gift the diaspora is prepared to give. It is not a licence to skip the contract.

On the contrary. The same literature is emphatic that diaspora bonds succeed where there are strong and transparent legal systems for the enforcement of contracts, an absence of civil strife, and credible institutions to market and honour the instrument.^[13] The patriotic discount lowers the price of the money. Transparency and enforceability are what make people willing to lend it at all. Israel registered its offerings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The diaspora’s affection bought Israel a better interest rate; it did not buy Israel an exemption from disclosure.

The patriotic discount is the gift the diaspora is prepared to give. It is not a licence to skip the contract.

V. The Diaspora Is Not One Thing

There is a further difficulty the announcement glides over, and it is the one Dr. Gevorkyan was most insistent upon.^[15] Guyana’s diaspora is not a single sentimental bloc waiting to be tapped. It is segmented — by generation, by class, and, most consequentially, by the ethnic and political lines that have organised Guyanese life since before independence.

The scale of the Guyanese diaspora is massive; with an estimated 1.5 million Guyanese living abroad compared to approximately 816,000 in the homeland, Guyana possesses one of the highest emigration-to-population ratios in the world.^[16][17] Personal remittances have historically sustained the local economy, contributing US$545 million in 2023 (representing 3.27% of GDP).^[18][19]

The Guyanese of Richmond Hill and Schenectady, of suburban Toronto, of South London do not all hear the same appeal in the same way. A bond floated by a PPP government will register with some of the diaspora as a national instrument and with others as a partisan one. Trust, in the Guyanese case, is not a generic civic virtue that can be assumed into existence by a presidential sentence; it is the precise commodity that sixty years of ethnic and political contest have made scarce.

This is why the harder work, as that conversation concluded, is not the legal or the financial structure — those can be bought from any competent advisory house in New York or London. The harder work is inclusion: designing and governing the instrument so that a Guyanese of any background can buy it without the suspicion that she is funding one faction’s monument. A bond that mobilises only half the diaspora is not merely smaller than it might have been. It is a quiet referendum on whose transformation this is — and the result will be read, at home and abroad, exactly as such. The deepest argument for transparent terms and independent oversight is not that they reassure the bond markets. It is that, in a society this Journal has elsewhere described as governed too long by the politics of ethnic security, credible governance is the only language of trust that every segment of the diaspora can read at once.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana has approximately 1.5 million citizens living abroad versus 816,000 at home — one of the world’s highest emigration-to-population ratios. The diaspora sent US$545 million in remittances in 2023 alone, unsecured and largely unrecognised.

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VI. The Unspoken Theory of the Economy

Set the two instructions side by side once more, and a single, unstated theory of the Guyanese economy comes into view.

The diaspora is asked to send hard currency in, to be deployed by the state into infrastructure on terms the state has not yet specified. The resident business class is advised to send its capital and ambition out, because the domestic field is increasingly occupied by foreign firms the Government itself has courted and celebrated. Foreign direct investment (FDI) pours in at the top, reaching a record US$8.63 billion in 2024 (representing 34.75% of GDP).^[20][21] Diaspora savings are summoned to the public account. And the Guyanese who are physically present, who employ their neighbours and pay tax in Guyanese dollars, are gently shown the departure lounge.

What unites these flows is a single view of Guyanese capital — whether it sits in Georgetown or in Schenectady — as fungible, mobile, and ultimately secondary to the foreign investment that sets the pace. The diaspora’s money is wanted; the diaspora’s standing as a principal, with the rights of a creditor, is not yet offered. The resident entrepreneur’s loyalty is assumed; the resident entrepreneur’s claim on the home market is not yet protected. In both cases the Guyanese is welcomed as financing but not yet empowered as decision-making capital.

Students of Caribbean political economy will recognise the pattern, because two of its keenest readers named it long before there was oil to name it over. Lloyd Best warned that an economy organised around an export staple reproduces a “plantation logic” — wealth extracted, locals employed, the decisions taken elsewhere — unless its institutions are deliberately designed to resist that logic.^[22] Walter Rodney taught us to ask, of any flow of wealth, who is developed and who is underdeveloped by the very same transaction.^[23] Neither was writing about petroleum, and neither was writing about a Guyana sixty years independent and suddenly rich. But the question they pressed is precisely the one these two instructions raise: in a prosperous, foreign-led boom, is Guyanese capital being made a principal in the transformation, or merely enlisted to finance, staff, and applaud a transformation directed elsewhere? That is not a charge of colonial continuity. It is a test the country can still choose to pass — and the diaspora bond is one of the places it will be graded.

In both cases the Guyanese is welcomed as financing but not yet empowered as decision-making capital.

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VII. What a Credible Bond Would Require

I have argued in these pages, more than once, that Guyana’s oil wealth is not a windfall to be managed but a moral test to be passed, and that the test is one of institutional architecture, not of revenue. The diaspora bond is that test in miniature. Done as the precedents demand, it could be one of the most dignifying instruments in the national repertoire — the moment the diaspora stops being treated as a remittance machine and becomes a creditor with a contract and a claim. Done as it has so far been announced, it risks being a patriotic tax on affection, raised against undefined works, repayable on faith.

To establish a credible and robust diaspora bond framework, the Government of Guyana must transition from sentimental appeals to institutional guarantees. The table below outlines the critical differences between the current approach and a professional, contract-based framework.

None of this is rhetorical, and none of it is expensive to supply. Every line in that table is ordinary practice in any credible sovereign issuance; what is missing in Guyana’s case is not money or expertise but the decision to treat the diaspora as a creditor rather than a congregation. And one item appears in no prospectus: an honest reckoning, at home, with why the resident business class is being counselled to leave — so that the same diaspora is not asked to finance an economy its own resident cousins are being advised to exit.

Come home, the President told the diaspora. Go abroad, the Minister told the residents. The country deserves a development strategy in which those two sentences can be spoken in the same week without facing away from each other — one in which Guyanese capital, wherever it sleeps at night, is treated as an owner of the transformation and not merely as its fuel. At sixty, that is the institutional settlement still waiting to be made.

The diaspora is ready to do its part; it always has been. First-generation Guyanese abroad will lend their country money at a generous rate, and gladly. They have, in truth, been doing something far more generous for sixty years — sending it home unsecured, unrepaid, and largely unrecognised. A diaspora bond worthy of the name would not ask them for one more act of faith. It would offer them a contract.

A diaspora bond worthy of the name would not ask them for one more act of faith. It would offer them a contract.

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References

1. Statista (2026). “Growth of the Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Guyana from 1980 to 2031.”
2. IMF (2026). “Guyana: Real GDP Growth Projected at 16.2% for 2026.” World Economic Outlook Database, April 2026.
3. Reuters (2026). “Guyana Economy Set to Grow 16.2% in 2026, Oil Sector Still Driving Expansion.” Reuters, January 26, 2026.
4. Hooper, V.J. (2026). “Who Owns Israel’s National Debt?” The Times of Israel, February 27, 2026 (Israel Bonds / Development Corporation for Israel cumulative worldwide sales exceeding US$55 billion since 1951).
5. Dolan, L.R. (2019). “Financing Development at Home: A Survey Experiment on Diaspora Bonds in India.” PEIO Conference, 2020.
6. Tribune Pakistan (2019). “PM’s Appeal to Invest in Diaspora Bonds Falls Flat.” The Express Tribune, July 24, 2019.
7. Guyana DPI (2025). “US$743M Spent in 2024 on Guyanese Suppliers by Oil Companies.” Department of Public Information, February 3, 2025.
8. Guyana Standard (2025). “Majority of US$743 Million Local Content Spending in 2024 Went Directly to Guyanese Firms.” Guyana Standard, March 7, 2025.
9. OilNow (2025). “Over 1,300 Guyanese Firms Registered Under Local Content Act.” OilNow, September 20, 2025.
10. S&P Global (2023). “The World’s Fastest-Growing Economy: Guyana’s Oil-Driven Expansion.” S&P Global Market Intelligence, November 22, 2023.
11. Ignite News (2026). “Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry Raises Concerns Over Foreign Investors’ Exclusion of Guyanese Businesses.” Ignite News, May 16, 2026.
12. Kaieteur News (2026). “As Foreign Companies Flock Guyana, Ashni Again Urges Locals to Look Abroad for Investment Opportunities.” Kaieteur News, May 30, 2026.
13. Ketkar, S.L. and Ratha, D. (2007). “Development Finance via Diaspora Bonds: Track Record and Potential.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4311. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
14. State Bank of India (2021). “SBI Raised US$1.6 Billion Under India Development Bonds During the 1991 Balance of Payments Crisis.” State Bank of India, November 9, 2021.
15. Guyana Business Journal (2025). “Transforming Guyana, Season III, Episode XI: Diaspora Bonds: Trust, Identity & Infrastructure in Guyana’s Development Journey.” GBJ & Magazine, June 11, 2025.
16. Statista (2022). “Chart: The World’s Biggest Diasporas — Guyana Leads Emigration Ratios.” Statista, November 22, 2022.
17. Forbes (2022). “Guyana Has the World’s Biggest Diaspora Relative to Population.” Forbes / Stabroek News, November 13, 2022.
18. World Bank. “Personal Remittances, Received (Current US$) — Guyana.” World Bank Open Data (BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT).
19. The Global Economy (2023). “Guyana Remittances as Percent of GDP.” The Global Economy Database, 2023.
20. Statbase (2024). “Foreign Direct Investment Inflows of Guyana, 1990–2024.” Statbase.org, 2024.
21. Trading Economics (2024). “Guyana Foreign Direct Investment, Net Inflows (% of GDP).” Trading Economics / World Bank Data, 2024.
22. Best, L. (1968). “Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy.” Social and Economic Studies, 17(3): 283–326.
23. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.
24. Alliance For Change (AFC) (2011). “Action Plan for Guyana.” Diaspora Policy, Item 6, p. 31. Georgetown: AFC.
25. Dr. Shamir Ally, Ph.D., MBA. Personal communication and contemporaneous account of the diaspora bond proposal submitted to President David Granger’s administration (APNU+AFC, 2016–2020) and the “Hold & Wait” response received. Dr. Ally served as a member of the AFC Diaspora Team and is listed as a contributor to the 2011 AFC Action Plan.
26. Demerara Waves (2026). “Guyana to Launch Diaspora Investment Bond.” Demerara Waves Online News, May 26, 2026 (also reporting the Guyana–Barbados Trident Arrow Investment Fund).
27. MCCGUSA Group. “Supporting Caribbean Intellectual Development and Research.” mccgusa.com.

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