Given the decades-long effort by governments to effectively organise and use the talent, finances and other resources of the Guyanese diaspora, my attention was recently drawn to an October 2020 study, ‘The Guyanese Diaspora’, done by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which provided some good information, comments and recommendations that should be of interest (https://csis-website-prod.s3. amazonaws.com /s3fs-public/publication /201019_ Matera_The_Guyanese_Diaspora.pdf
Following international practice, ‘diaspora’ is broadly described in a two-fold manner: as ‘emigrants and their descendants who live outside the country of their birth or ancestry, either on a temporary or permanent basis, yet still maintain affective and material ties to their countries of origin and as a “state of mind . . . a psychological belonging to a collective culture, host-land or homeland.’ Guyana has a population of 787,000 and about 30,000 persons migrate annually – one of the highest migration rates in the world. Settled Guyanese communities abroad often originate from close-knit communities in Guyana that usually mirror the ethnic and religious characteristics of those communities. These days, most Guyanese emigrate to the United States – 400,000 persons of Guyanese or Guyanese ancestry; Canada – between 88,570 and 200,000 in 2016, and some 30,000 Guyanese live in the United Kingdom. Smaller numbers are scattered worldwide.
