With Guyana, having, in recent years, established credentials as the region’s favoured location for the staging of events linked to burnishing the region’s business profile, the Caribbean Export Development Agency has recently announced that Georgetown, the country’s capital, will play host to the event this year.
The disclosure amounts to a vote of confidence in the country’s credentials to host an event that brings together high-profile business officials from across the Caribbean, North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, keen to further probe Guyana’s credentials as a prospective world class investment haven, given its new-found credentials as an emerging petro state. Guyana follows Trinidad (2022) and The Bahamas (2023) in hosting the event, one of the key criterion being that the hosts to the forum provide the strongest investment credentials likely to get the attention of the ‘high-flying’ international business community.
While, in the instances of Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas, both countries had long boasted among the best investment credentials in the region, Guyana’s meteoric rise in the regional investment pecking order derived largely from the incremental development of the country’s oil and gas industry that followed the 2015 disclosure of the country’s first confirmed oil find.
Still pressed to effect physical transformations to the country’s urban infrastructure to render the country’s capital ‘suitable’ to host global investment seekers, George-town is in the throes of a comprehensive ‘makeover,’ designed to upgrade facilities that range from hotels and places of entertainment to the country’s network of urban roadways. Simultaneously, there is evidence of upgrading undertakings in the country’s investment sector which, government hopes, will benefit from a ‘knock-on’ effect on visitor arrivals.
Official disclosure on the July 10-11 event indicates that the Investment Forum itself will be held at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre and that some of the deliberations will focus on investment potential in areas that include sustainable agriculture, green economy transition and digitalization of business. At the recent launch of what, reportedly, is a much anticipated forum, it was disclosed that the event will provide investment seekers with opportunities to present projects to both local and foreign investors who are expected to participate in the forum that could attract more than US$ 100 billion in investments.
