President Dr Irfaan Ali said that enhanced collaboration with the Dominican Republic (DR) would support Guyana’s drive to accelerate its development.
During a panel discussion today at the United Caribbean Forum by the bilateral chamber of commerce (represented in DR as Guyana Cham and in Guyana as DR Cham), at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, President Ali said that the Government aims to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that Guyana becomes on par with the developed world.
Against this backdrop, the Head of State explained that the Government has taken the approach of “building tomorrow, today”. He said that his Government is now applying world-class technology methods, and best practices to reduce the lag time in which Guyana will have to catch up with the rest of the world and take a lead position on many important global issues.
“It is for this reason, we see the DR as a critical part, in bridging this gap, when you speak about tourism, scale and capacity in the private sector, leveraging capital, looking at the value-added industry, in food production, all of these things, the DR would have…developed tremendous capacity and capability in.
“And, we see great synergy in the government and the private sector, working together in aligning those synergies and expanding the opportunities.”
The Head of State underscored that the key areas of cooperation that the two countries and their respective private sectors will focus on include: food security and agriculture; climate security, especially as it relates to the utilisation of forests as a tool to combat climate change and as an asset to generate revenue; energy security, as it relates to building out the transport and logistics sector and the use of science and technology to transform Guyana’s human resource assets, among many other areas.
“This, of course, requires governance institutions, systems, standards and services and this is where we are also collaborating with the DR so that we can apply the best global standards, we can build the most transparent systems, and we can realign our institutions to work in line with what we are building in Guyana, and to integrate the institutions to the goals that we are setting ourselves.”
President Ali pointed out that he has been working along with the President of the Dominican Republic, HE Luis Abinader on creating the supporting infrastructure.
“We’ve already seen successes. There are DR companies partnering with Guyanese companies in the building out of hotels, building out of stadiums, and in healthcare. We have collaboration already in tourism and training. So we’re already, in a relatively short period, in one year, seeing the fruits of the labour.”
Former President of the United States of America, Bill Clinton was featured at the event as a special guest. He said that his foundation, the Clinton Foundation, will assist the two countries in building the unity they want.
He added that countries in the Americas should work closer together and he hopes that the partnership between the two governments, private sectors, and non-governmental organisations; will “give new life to CARICOM, and new life to any organisations that are active here”.
“We are almost always stronger together…,” Clinton said, stating that the forum is a “big and good thing” and that he hopes “we can give life to it after this conference”.
