In 2026, Guyana positioned for transition to 1st-world services, infrastructure

Ruminations wishes our sisters and brothers a happy New Year. We wish that 2026 will be a great year for Guyana and for all Guyanese. Our country is transitioning rapidly, and as proud as we are of the developments in 2025, we are eagerly looking forward to 2026.
For those of us who have been fortunate to visit different countries around the world during the Christmas season, the decorations and the festivities in Georgetown and different parts of Guyana, including the Main Street Christmas Village and the Kingston Seawall Christmas Market, rank among the best in the world. Clearly, Christmas 2025 sets a new bar for Guyana. I believe that in CARICOM, there is nothing to match what Christmas 2025 in Guyana was. As 2026 arrives, Guyana has much to look forward to.
Throughout December President Irfaan Ali, VP Bharat Jagdeo, and Minister Ashni Singh have reminded Guyanese and the world that Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund (NRF) has more money in it to pay off our total national public debt and still have significant funding remaining. We should all be proud that Guyana stands today as one of only a handful of countries that has enough money in reserves to cover its total public debt. This astounding achievement seems impossible to many around the world because one of the many threats and crises that the world is dealing with is national public debt.
Global public debt reached a record high of about US$105 trillion in 2025 compared to about US$50 trillion in 2010. Although public debt in developing countries accounted for less than one-third of the total – about US$33 trillion – it has grown twice as fast in developing countries as in developed countries since 2010. While Latin America and the Caribbean have increased public debt 2.5 times more than in 2010, developed countries increased by 1.5 times.
The UN believes that public debt is a major problem impacting the abilities of countries around the world to deliver on their SDGs, leading to more than 65 per cent of the SDG targets being off-track for 2030. Globally, 3.4 billion people (almost 50 per cent of the global population) live in countries where interest payments on their public debt are more than their total expenditure on health or education. A record 61 developing countries spend more than 10 per cent of their total revenues on interest on their public debt. Africa, for example, spends US$70 per capita on interest for their public debt, while spending only US$63 and US$44 per capita on education and health. In Latin America and the Caribbean, per capita spending on interest reached US$353, slightly below the $382 per capita on health and $403 on education.
Guyana’s per capita interest payment on debt servicing amounted to less than US$240 per capita, much less than the Latin America and Caribbean average. In contrast, its per capita expenditure on health is more than $US1200 and on education more than $1500. Overall, in a world where many countries’ public debt-to-GDP ratio is far above 100 per cent and where the majority of countries spend more than 10 per cent of their national revenues on debt servicing, Guyana’s public debt-to-GDP ratio is under 20 per cent today, with a debt servicing of below four per cent of total revenues. Guyana stands as one of only a handful of countries that have enough money in just their NRF to simply pay off all their loans.
This is significant because Guyana can use most of its revenues for national development. This is now transforming Guyana. For example, in 2026, Guyana is looking to become a fully digitalised society. President Irfaan Ali stated that from passports to renewal of driver licences to banking and to patient care, Guyana’s bold digital transformation aims to make Government and services faster and more accessible. A key component to enable full digitalisation is for all citizens to obtain an e-ID card. That process has already begun. Already banks have started to allow online banking, and citizens can apply for passports in certain instances online.
Already, GPHC has gone online with medical records already transitioning from paper-based to electronic record-keeping. By the middle of 2026, most of the records at GPHC will be electronic. The Pathology Lab is already fully digitalised, utilising virtual reading of laboratory tests by pathologists in New York and other distant places. The Minister of Health has announced that all public labs in Guyana will become connected to the electronic record system. By the end of 2026, Guyana expects that many public health institutions will move to electronic records. As a consequence, at GPHC, patients can begin to make appointments online, and some clinics are already utilising virtual patient visits.
But Guyana is also well on its way to transforming how Guyana looks through massive physical infrastructure projects. The recently commissioned Bharat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge already has transformed how Guyana looks. We can begin to see Guyana looking like a developed country. The Demerara Bridge already sees more than 50,000 vehicles crossing per day. With a new Wismar bridge soon to be commissioned, a new Berbice Bridge and a new Corentyne River Bridge, with new hospitals, particularly a new GPHC, new schools, new hotels, and with more than 40,000 new homes on their way, these should add to the total transformation of Guyana, and these should become visible as soon as 2026.
With Guyana’s first gas-to-energy plant set for commissioning in 2026, Guyana is set to reduce its fossil fuel use by almost 50 per cent in 2026. This and many other developmental projects consolidate Guyana’s exciting transition from a country with an infrastructure more like that of an LDC to an infrastructure that looks more like a developed country.
Happy New Year, Dr Leslie Ramsammy
December 29, 2025