I saw this report in The Telegraph, published last Monday, which claimed that 48% of Guyana’s population live on just £4 a day (about GY$1,100). This is the sort of statistic that, without noting it was from 2019, too neatly fits the overall narrative of the article, which was that despite years of oil-fueled double-digit economic growth, a massive portion of Guyana’s population continues to live in stress and poverty, affected only in negative ways by the boom, and effectively in the same place they were six years ago.
It reads like one of those pieces foreign reporters produce every other day when they drop into Georgetown: Guyana has struck oil, wealth is pouring in, the government insists it is investing wisely, but the country is split into the haves and the havenots. I’m not writing to endorse or dispute this narrative, but to talk about what is needed to make sure true stories are told about Guyana’s development.
The figure, specifically 48.4 percent, comes from the World Bank’s 2019 estimate using a US$5.50 per day poverty line. It was a valid data point when it was published. But it describes a country that no longer exists. That Guyana was a small state with sluggish growth and limited fiscal space. Oil production began in December 2019; the sector did not impact the economy until the year after. The nation had not yet seen its gross domestic product (GDP) swell. The sprawling capital budgets, wage increases, infrastructure boom, and influx of private investment were still mostly in the realm of hopes and plans. It had not seen a five-month electoral impasse, over 1,000 deaths due to COVID-19, all the new and exacerbated problems the oil age brings Guyana, and a change in government.
To apply that figure to 2025 Guyana is to freeze the country in an era that ended the moment the Liza Destiny began pumping crude in December of that year.
But the deeper problem here is why that statistic remains the most widely available one. Guyana has no updated national poverty figures, no new household income and expenditure data, and no comprehensive inequality indicators. In April, the World Bank itself said in its Macro Poverty Outlook that while the government is implementing an ambitious investment program, “Lack of recent data on poverty and equity limits the effectiveness and monitoring of public policies to reduce poverty.”
So critics continue reaching for the only number on the shelf. And the public is left with the impression that Guyana is somehow generating unprecedented wealth while leaving half its population in deep poverty. This is not to say that I am blind to inequality or that the conversations about hardship lack factual grounding. Anyone who lives in Guyana can see there is a duality. **One Guyana** is exploding with construction, new restaurants, upscale housing, and a standard of living unlike just a decade ago. Others remain in wooden structures battered by the elements; squatting communities lining villages, and pockets of urban and rural poverty that have not moved in step with the positive headlines. The divide is visible and socially understood.
But these snapshots are not enough. They tell us inequality exists, but not specifically how widespread. For that, the country needs updated, methodologically robust data that agencies like the Bureau of Statistics are there to produce.
Guyana’s Bureau of Statistics is the institution responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating the country’s official data. It is meant to be the country’s mirror: reflecting shifts in its population, employment patterns, household welfare, demographic changes, trends in consumption, and the social impacts of national policies. The Bureau has been unable to produce the most fundamental report for years. The most recent census was conducted in 2022. As of late 2025, the final report still has not been released.
Three years is quite ridiculous for census reporting. The Bureau is reported as rejecting claims that the delay is due to political interference, stressing that it wants to ensure accuracy, and offering that census exercises across the Caribbean have also experienced delays. The government has been aware of some preliminary data for at least a year now. Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh told Stabroek News, according to an article published last Wednesday, that he plans to raise the issue of the delay with Chief Statistician Errol La Cruez.
A delayed census means the country is operating with incomplete demographic information at crucial moments. One such was the 2025 polls, which saw the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) produce an Official List of Electors (OLE) containing 757,690 eligible voters. This was a staggering number for a people who have long thought their population, inclusive of children, to be about 750,000. Timely census data could have moved the needle on what is either just a misunderstanding, or a real damn problem.
Even a 2022 census begins to dull with time. In the years since, the economic boom has reshaped the country’s population patterns, from the influx of Venezuelan migrants and other foreign workers to the return of Guyanese remigrants seeking new opportunities.
Ministries are designing programmes without updated population baselines, just as the private sector must make investment decisions. International agencies cannot accurately measure social progress. Journalists and analysts cannot sufficiently contextualize economic growth.
This vacuum hurts everyone. It hurts the government, because its social programmes, wage increases and infrastructural upgrades cannot be validated against new poverty or inequality data. It hurts the opposition, which risks shaping its critiques around obsolete data. It hurts civil society, which are less well positioned to identify evidence-based areas for intervention. And it hurts the public, which must navigate the largest economic transition in its history without a clear, empirical picture of how that transition is reshaping the national population.
The truth may be that Guyana’s statistical machinery was designed for a low-growth, low-complexity economy, and is now being asked to operate in a high-growth, high-complexity environment, without being modernized at the pace demanded by the country’s transformation. If not that, then something sinister is at play.
The country does not need more rhetoric about prosperity or hardship. It needs measurement. It needs a fresh Household Income and Expenditure Survey. It needs updated poverty numbers, updated inequality indices, updated labour market data, and annualized social indicators.
A society cannot govern fairly or argue honestly when it does not know itself in full. Guyana is living through a once-in-a-century upheaval, and it needs all the tools it can get to confront it.
