Dear Editor,
I read with interest the recent report on Guyana’s population officially surpassing one million residents, as announced by Chief Statistician Errol La Cruez in observance of World Population Day 2026. That we have grown from 878,674 at the 2022 census to over 1,025,000 by the end of last year is a remarkable statistic, and it says a great deal about the confidence people have in this country’s future.
But a milestone like this should prompt more than celebration; it should prompt stock-taking. The same data that gives us reason for pride also gives us reason for urgency. We are told that 61 percent of the population is under 35 and 42 percent under 25. That is an extraordinary asset for a nation still building out its workforce and its institutions. It is also an extraordinary obligation. A youthful, growing population needs real sustainable employment, among other institutions specifically for this population in step with its growth, not years behind it.
An age profile this young also means the current pace of job creation, however encouraging, has to accelerate rather than simply continue. With over 60 percent of the population under 35 and more than 40 percent under 25, tens of thousands of new entrants will be reaching working age every single year for at least the next decade. A labour market that absorbs today’s graduates, including online degrees and certifications, at today’s rate risks falling behind a cohort that is still growing in size. Matching recent gains, unemployment nearly halving and youth unemployment falling even faster, is not enough on its own; the rate of job creation needs to outpace the rate at which young people are entering the workforce, not merely keep step with it.
That progress on unemployment shows our economic expansion is translating into real opportunity, and it is worth acknowledging. Yet growth on this scale, driven by both natural increase and migration, tends to concentrate pressure unevenly. Region Four alone already holds close to 40 percent of the population. If housing, utilities, and transportation planning do not keep pace with where people are actually settling, the benefits of a growing economy will be felt unevenly too.
Other resource-rich nations offer useful lessons here, in both directions. Botswana, after diamond production transformed its economy in the decades following independence, made a deliberate practice of channeling resource revenue into roads, schools, and clinics ahead of demand rather than behind it, and is often held up as an example of a small, fast-growing economy that avoided the worst of the “resource curse.” Equatorial Guinea, by contrast, saw oil wealth and rapid population growth in its capital region outpace investment in broad-based infrastructure and services, leaving much of the benefit concentrated in a narrow slice of society even as the national statistics looked impressive on paper. The difference between the two was not the size of the growth, but how deliberately it was planned for.
I would like to see the Bureau of Statistics’ data paired more visibly with concrete infrastructure and social-service planning, not simply cited as a marker of progress. Reaching one million people is a genuine achievement. Whether it becomes a lasting one, and whether Guyana follows Botswana’s path rather than Equatorial Guinea’s, depends on what we build, and how quickly, in the years just ahead.