What the University of Guyana Must Become.
A message to Professor Stafford Griffith, Dr Diana Gobin, and the incoming leadership of the University of Guyana.
Professor Stafford Griffith. Dr Diana Devika Gobin. The incoming Chair of the Committee of Deans. You have inherited the stewardship of an institution that carries a weight greater than its own future. The University of Guyana is not simply a place where degrees are conferred and lectures delivered. It is the single most important institution in Guyana’s effort to be something other than a country that pumps oil and watches foreign engineers, foreign contractors, and foreign companies do the thinking that Guyanese ought to be doing for themselves. What you do in the next months, and what the next Vice-Chancellor does in the decade that follows, will determine whether Guyana owns its own future or leases it at a price it cannot afford.
Guyana1News writes to you not with criticism but with the directness that this moment demands. The transitional period is not a pause in the University’s mission. It is an opportunity to reset its direction. And the direction it must go is towards the skills that build nations, the physical environment that commands respect, and the institutional ambition that matches the scale of what Guyana is becoming.
Guyana is extracting oil from formations that required some of the most sophisticated engineering knowledge in the world to find, reach, and produce. Not one of those engineers was trained at the University of Guyana. That is not an accusation. It is a measurement of the distance between where the University is and where it must go.
The Engineering Crisis: Skills That Build a Nation Are Almost Absent
Let us begin with the most urgent gap, because it is also the one with the most immediate consequences for Guyanese lives and Guyanese sovereignty over their own development.
Guyana is experiencing a construction boom of extraordinary scale. New roads, new bridges, new airports, new housing schemes, new gas plants, new government facilities. Every one of these projects requires engineering expertise. The Gas-to-Energy project at Wales required civil and geotechnical engineers to assess soil conditions. It required structural engineers to design the turbine foundations. It required mechanical and electrical engineers to specify the systems. The soil shifted. The foundations cracked. The project is two years delayed and has cost the country nearly US$900 million more than contracted. One of the many unanswered questions in that saga is how thoroughly the soil was assessed before construction began, and whether Guyanese geotechnical engineers were involved in that assessment or whether, as with so much of the expert work on Guyana’s major infrastructure projects, the assessment was performed by foreign consultants whose work was not independently verified.
The reason that question is so important is that it is not unique to the Gas-to-Energy project. It reflects a systemic absence of engineering specialisation in Guyana’s professional workforce. The University of Guyana produces graduates in several fields, including some engineering disciplines. But the specialised engineering skills that Guyana’s rapidly growing economy most urgently needs are almost entirely absent from its domestic professional supply. They include the following:
- Geotechnical and Soil Engineers. Guyana’s coastal plain is one of the most challenging construction environments on earth. Much of the inhabited coastline sits below sea level, built on soft alluvial deposits that shift, settle, and compress under structural loads. Every building, road, bridge, and pipeline constructed on Guyana’s coast rests on soils that require expert assessment. The structural cracks in the Gas-to-Energy foundations. The building collapse at Atlantic Gardens that killed carpenter Radesh Domingo. The MV Barima wharf at Port Kaituma that developed structural problems after the surrounding soil shifted, keeping the replacement ferry idle for three years while an 87-year-old vessel continued to sail. Every one of these failures has a geotechnical dimension. Guyana needs geotechnical engineers who understand its specific soil conditions, and it needs to train them at home.
- Water Resource and Hydraulic Engineers. Guyana is the Land of Many Waters. Its coastline is maintained by a sea defence system. Its agriculture depends on an irrigation and drainage network. Its towns flood when that network fails. Its coastline is threatened by sea level rise driven by climate change. Its interior communities depend on river systems that carry the sediment loads and seasonal fluctuations of a major tropical river system. Managing all of this requires hydraulic engineers, drainage engineers, coastal engineers, and water resource specialists. Guyana trains very few of these. It imports most of its water engineering expertise. In a nation defined by its relationship with water, that is an extraordinary absence.
- Structural and Civil Engineers with Tropical Specialisation. The buildings going up across Guyana’s coastline are being built at speed. Speed without expertise produces the structural failures that are already occurring. The University of Guyana must expand and deepen its civil and structural engineering programmes to produce graduates who understand tropical construction conditions, who know the specific properties of Guyanese soils and materials, and who can provide the independent verification of structural designs that prevents the kind of failures that are occurring at an accelerating rate as the construction boom outpaces the oversight infrastructure.
- Environmental Engineers and Scientists. Guyana’s oil sector operates in one of the most ecologically sensitive marine environments in the Western Hemisphere. The management of produced water, drilling waste, and oil spill risk requires environmental engineers who understand the specific ecology of the Guyana shelf. The management of mining waste in the interior requires environmental scientists who can assess the downstream impacts on Guyana’s river systems and communities. These professionals do not exist in sufficient numbers in Guyana. The University of Guyana must produce them.
- Petroleum and Reservoir Engineers. This is the most glaring absence of all. Guyana is one of the fastest-growing oil producers on earth, with more than 900,000 barrels per day from the Stabroek Block and multiple new fields coming onstream. The engineers who design the wells, manage the reservoirs, optimise the production systems, and verify the recoverable resource estimates are almost entirely foreign. Guyana has allowed its oil sector to grow to a scale that generates billions of dollars per year without developing a domestic supply of the engineers who understand what is happening under the seabed. This must change. The University of Guyana should have a Petroleum Engineering programme. The fact that it does not, in 2026, is the single most emblematic evidence of the mismatch between Guyana’s economic position and its educational infrastructure.
- Urban Planners and Infrastructure Architects. Georgetown is expanding rapidly. New housing schemes are appearing on the East Coast and East Bank. Hinterland communities are growing. All of this expansion requires professional urban planners who understand how to design communities that are liveable, resilient, and appropriate for Guyana’s climate and culture. Guyana imports most of this expertise or proceeds without it. The consequences are visible in the unplanned peri-urban sprawl, the flooding in poorly drained new developments, and the inadequate public spaces in communities built for speed rather than quality of life.
Every engineering failure in Guyana’s oil-era infrastructure has a common thread: foreign expertise that was either absent, insufficient, or unverifiable. The cure for that is not better foreign experts. The cure is Guyanese experts, trained at a University of Guyana that has been transformed into an institution capable of producing them.
A Message to the Transitional Team: Set the Direction Before the Next VC Arrives
Professor Griffith. Dr Gobin. The months ahead are yours to shape. We are not asking you to build a petroleum engineering school in the next six months. We are asking you to do something that is within your immediate authority and requires no capital budget and no new appointments: set the direction.
Commission an honest audit of the engineering and applied science disciplines the Guyanese economy needs over the next twenty years and compare that to what the University of Guyana currently offers. Publish the gap. Name it plainly. Tell the country that the University is aware that it is not producing the engineers Guyana needs and that correcting that is now a strategic priority. Then build the case for the incoming Vice-Chancellor to act on it with the full support of the Council.
The Local Content Act requires that Guyanese companies and workers receive preference in the oil sector supply chain. That requirement is weakened whenever a Guyanese company cannot find a qualified Guyanese engineer to do the technical work the contract demands. The University of Guyana is not separate from the Local Content agenda. It is the foundation of it. Without graduates who can staff the technical roles that oil sector operators and contractors need, local content remains a market share argument rather than a skills transfer. The University of Guyana must become the institution that makes Guyanese technical capability real.
The Campus: A Physical Statement of National Ambition
Now let us talk about something that may seem less urgent than engineering curricula but is, in its way, equally important. Because a university’s campus is not just a collection of buildings. It is a statement of what a nation believes education deserves. And right now, the University of Guyana’s campus does not reflect the nation Guyana is becoming.
Guyana is a country of extraordinary natural beauty. Its interior is among the most pristine wilderness areas on earth. Its rivers are the arteries of a landscape that has defined the culture and survival of its people for centuries. Its name means Land of Many Waters, a name that carries poetry, identity, and ecological truth. The University of Guyana sits on a campus that should reflect all of that. Instead, it often reflects the constraints of decades of underfunding, deferred maintenance, and institutional modesty that is no longer appropriate for a university in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
Guyana1News is putting forward a vision for what the University of Guyana’s campus should become. Not as an architectural specification, but as a statement of what is possible and what is owed to the students, faculty, and nation that this institution serves.
Water: The Identity of the Campus
Guyana is the Land of Many Waters. That identity should be present on the University campus in a way that is intentional, beautiful, and ecologically meaningful. Water features, reflecting pools, canal-side walkways, botanical water gardens fed by natural rainfall and designed to showcase Guyana’s extraordinary aquatic flora. Not ornamental ponds as an afterthought, but water as a central design principle of the campus, integrated into the courtyards between faculties, flowing through the central open spaces, visible from every major building. A university campus that makes a visitor stop and say: this is Guyana, and Guyana knows what it is.
Landscaping: A Campus That Mesmerises
The University of Guyana sits in a country with some of the most extraordinary botanical diversity in the hemisphere. It should look like it knows that. The campus grounds should be a living laboratory of Guyanese plant life: the Victoria Amazonica in reflective pools, the Heliconia along the walkways, the Mora and Purpleheart trees that shade the quadrangles, the medicinal plants of the Amerindian tradition cultivated in dedicated gardens maintained by the Faculty of Natural Sciences. Landscaping that is curated, maintained, and designed with the same intention that Guyana’s oil revenues are bringing to road infrastructure and airport development. A campus that students arrive at each morning and feel the pride of being Guyanese.
Student Residences: Attracting the Best of the Caribbean
The University of the West Indies competes for the best Caribbean students by offering a campus experience that is international in quality and Caribbean in character. The University of Guyana must compete in that market. It has one significant advantage: it sits in the most rapidly transforming economy in the Western Hemisphere, in a country where the engineering, environmental, and resource sector opportunities available to graduating students are extraordinary. It also has one significant disadvantage: its residential infrastructure does not attract students from across the region who have alternatives.
New purpose-built student residences, designed for Guyana’s climate, with air conditioning, reliable internet, communal spaces for study and collaboration, and a physical environment that a Caribbean student from Trinidad, Barbados, or Jamaica would choose over their alternatives, are not a luxury. They are a competitive necessity. The University of Guyana should be attracting the engineering students, the environmental science students, and the oil sector professionals of the next generation from across the Caribbean, not just from within Guyana. That will only happen if the campus experience matches the academic opportunity.
Centres of Excellence: Buildings That Signal Seriousness
A Faculty of Engineering that looks like a faculty of engineering. A Centre for Water Sciences and Hydraulic Research that is equipped, functional, and staffed. A Petroleum Technology Centre, developed in partnership with ExxonMobil, Chevron, and the other operators of the Stabroek Block, that trains Guyanese engineers in the specific disciplines of offshore production, reservoir management, and petroleum systems. A Centre for Tropical Architecture and Urban Planning that produces the designers who will shape Guyana’s cities over the next fifty years.
These buildings need not be monuments of glass and steel. They should be expressions of Guyanese architecture: tropical, climate-responsive, beautiful in the specific way that Guyana’s natural environment is beautiful. But they must be equipped, maintained, and staffed to a standard that matches the ambition of a nation generating billions of dollars in oil revenues annually.
A university campus is the physical expression of a nation’s belief in its own future. When students walk through the gates of the University of Guyana every morning, the campus they see should tell them: this nation takes its own people seriously. Right now, it does not always say that. It should.
The Funding Argument: There Is No Longer an Excuse
The University of Guyana has operated for decades under resource constraints that were real and severe. Guyana was a poor country. The University was underfunded. The campus reflected that reality. That reality no longer exists.
The Natural Resource Fund has received US$9.3 billion since 2020. The 2026 national budget is a record GYD $1.558 trillion. The government is spending GYD $4.1 billion on hinterland airstrip rehabilitation this year. It is spending GYD $600 million on maintenance of 51 government-operated airstrips. It is building municipal airports at Lethem and Rose Hall. It is funding a Gas-to-Energy project whose total cost has grown to approximately US$2 billion. In this context, the argument that the University of Guyana cannot be funded to the level its national importance demands is not an economic argument. It is a political one. It is a choice.
The ExxonMobil Greater Guyana Initiative has US$100 million committed to Guyanese capacity development. The government has a legitimate claim on a portion of that funding, as a condition of operating in Guyana’s waters, to support the University’s engineering and petroleum science programmes. The IDB, the World Bank, and CARICOM development institutions all have frameworks for supporting tertiary education investment in rapidly developing economies. The University of Guyana is not short of potential funding sources. It is short of the institutional ambition and the government commitment to pursue them at the scale the moment demands.
To Professor Griffith and Dr Gobin: A Direct Ask
We are asking you, specifically and directly, to use the transitional period to do three things.
- Commission and publish an Engineering and Applied Sciences Skills Gap Report, mapping the engineering disciplines Guyana’s economy needs against what the University currently offers. Make this public. Let the country see the gap in writing, from the institution that is responsible for closing it.
- Establish an emergency working group on campus transformation, comprising architects, landscape designers, environmental scientists, and students, to produce a published Master Plan for the physical redevelopment of the University campus. The plan does not need to be funded in the transitional period. It needs to exist, so that the incoming Vice-Chancellor has a mandate and a vision to implement.
- Open formal discussions with the oil sector operators, ExxonMobil Guyana, Chevron, and Hess, about partnership in the development of a Petroleum Engineering and Energy Sciences programme at the University. These conversations will take years to conclude. They must begin immediately if the next generation of Guyanese petroleum engineers is to be trained here rather than abroad.
The University Guyana Deserves
Guyana is watching its oil revenues flow through the Natural Resource Fund, its construction sites fill with foreign contractors, and its engineering failures compound on each other because the domestic professional supply is insufficient for the scale of what is being built. The University of Guyana is the institution that changes that. Not overnight. Not in a transitional period. But over the decade of intentional investment and purposeful leadership that must begin now.
Imagine a campus where the Victoria Amazonica blooms in a courtyard pool between the Faculty of Engineering and the Centre for Water Sciences. Where the shade of Purpleheart trees lines the walkway from the new student residences to the library. Where a student from Barbados, choosing between the UWI and the UG, chooses Guyana because the campus is beautiful, the opportunities are extraordinary, and the nation it sits in is building something unprecedented. Where a Guyanese soil engineer, trained here, reviews the geotechnical report on the next major infrastructure project and tells the government that the foundations will hold.
That is not a fantasy. It is a project. And the people reading this editorial have the authority to begin it.
Source: Guyana1news
