Expanding housing programme: Govt advances land acquisition talks with NICIL

Housing Ministers Collin Croal and Vanessa Benn met with officials from the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL) on Wednesday to discuss the acquisition and management of state lands.

The meeting, held at the Ministry’s main office boardroom, was led by NICIL Chairman Radha Krishna Sharma. The discussions focused on the transfer of lands currently under NICIL’s control to support the Government’s national housing programme. Officials also addressed the regularisation of informal settlements that may fall within NICIL-managed areas.
Also at the meeting were Permanent Secretary Bishram Kuppen, Chief Development Planner Germene Stewart, and Head of the Corporate Legal Secretariat, Haniffah Jordan.
In December 2025, Croal had disclosed that the housing Ministry was working along with other state agencies to acquire lands across the country to fulfil the more than 78,000-application backlog for house lots. Croal had explained that while they were able to allocate over 53,000, there are still in excess of 78,000 pending applications in the system.
To meet this demand, he noted that “…we are continuously working to find land [and] to engage with our partners in terms of Guyana Lands and Survey Commission [GLSC], NICIL [National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited], GuySuCo [Guyana Sugar Corporation], and, in Region Five’s case, for example, MMA [Mahaica, Mahaicony, Abary Agriculture Authority], to be able to acquire additional lands to address these backlogs.”
According to the Housing Minister, the Government is committed to completely clearing the backlogs in the various administrative regions across Guyana except for Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) – the country’s most populated region.
In fact, of the 78,000 pending house lot applications, Region Four accounts for more than 52,000 of the backlog.
Construction of homes
In its last term in office, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration had committed to allocate some 50,000 house lots across the country – a promise it surpassed. During this new term, the Dr Irfaan Ali-led Government aims to construct 40,000 new homes, that is, 8000 houses annually.

During his December 17, 2025 address to the nation, in which he detailed the PPP/C policy agenda for economic and social transformation of Guyana and Guyanese over the next five years, President Ali had indicated that, “Many persons who want to own their own homes are now telling the Ministry we don’t want land; we want you to help us build because of the difficulty in managing contractors, because of the time it takes from them to go and build their home, to buy materials, and the stress – they will be saving all of that, and it is because of this high demand from people directly for the Government to support the building of the homes that we need to build these 40,000 homes.”
In response to this growing demand for fully built, move-in-ready (turnkey) houses, Croal had pointed out that the Ministry had moved away from the practice used during the last term of utilising only local contractors and the traditional way of building homes, which saw the construction of only 4000 houses over the last five years.
Expressions of Interest (EoIs) were extended to contractors beyond Guyana to include those from around the Caribbean region.