GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A Caribbean engineer’s “Friction Economy” theory names the question Guyana has never asked about its migrant workforce — not who authorized them, but what they could build if anyone looked

A Jamaican born engineer living in Brazil recently gave the Business Guardian an economic vocabulary Guyana badly needs and does not have. Kimroy Bailey, with his wife Sherika Trott Bailey, has spent the last six years  across South Korea, Brazil, and now a still-unrealized interest in Trinidad and Tobago, developing what they call the Trott Bailey Friction Economy Theory: the idea that a country can be sitting on capability, need, and resources simultaneously, and still generate nothing, because nothing connects them.

Kimroy and Sherika Trott Bailey

Bailey’s illustration is deliberately small. A builder needs a tool. A welder needs a workspace. Between them, both problems are solvable. But if neither has capital, the transaction defaults to a market that doesn’t exist, and both needs go unmet, not because the value isn’t there, but because nothing in the system is designed to notice it.

Guyana should sit with that example longer than a headline allows, because it describes, almost exactly, the shape of the country’s migrant labor problem — a problem this paper has been documenting piece by piece for over a year, and one Guyana has no functioning framework to answer.

THE GAP HAS A PAPER TRAIL

Start with what is not disputed. In February 2024, Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorized a company called Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. to recruit up to 500 healthcare workers from Bangladesh, at Sigma’s own request. Government later confirmed zero recruits were ever brought in under that authorization. The shortages it was meant to address were filled instead by Cuban medical personnel — an entirely separate migration channel, with its own unresolved allegations of labor exploitation that this paper has tracked independently.

Meanwhile, the same Sigma entity was executing a very different kind of contract: multi-billion-dollar water treatment infrastructure work for Guyana Water Inc., beginning just seven days after its Guyana incorporation in October 2022. Photographic evidence obtained by this paper — including GWI’s own published Facebook post — shows work crews at these plant sites that are visibly, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing beside a caption claiming the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” No Guyanese face is identifiable in the image GWI chose to publish alongside that claim.

Guyana’s own laws require labor market testing before a foreign worker is hired: an employer must show the position could not be filled locally. The Local Content Act names engineering and technical services explicitly among the sectors covered by local-hiring obligations. Whether that testing was done for this workforce, whether it was done at all — is not publicly documented anywhere. Nobody has been made to show their work.

This is not a story about Sigma’s guilt or innocence in a separate procurement scandal, which is its own matter and still unfolding.

It is a story about a state that has built an elaborate machinery for awarding contracts and no comparable machinery for accounting for the labor those contracts pull into the country, where it comes from, what it can do beyond the single task it was imported for, or what it leaves behind when the contract ends

REGISTRATION IS NOT THE SAME QUESTION AS CAPABILITY

Bailey’s caution to Trinidad applies with equal force here: a government’s instinct, faced with a migrant population it does not understand, is to register it – for identity and security reasons that are genuinely legitimate. But registration answers only who is here. It says nothing about what they can do, and worse, when skills-mapping does happen, it is almost always aimed at slotting migrants into existing vacancies.

As Bailey put it, if a Guyanese and a migrant are both qualified for one job, mapping both of their abilities doesn’t create a second position.      Someone still loses, and the country stays locked inside the same “local versus migrant” argument, just with better paperwork.

That argument is precisely where Guyana’s migrant labor discourse has been stuck, a discourse of suspicion in one direction (are jobs being taken) and pretext in the other (is a healthcare authorization actually cover for engineering labor), with almost no public attention paid to what either group of workers, Guyanese or migrant, is actually capable of beyond the narrow occupational box a work permit or an NPTAB bid document assigns them.

WHAT THE FRICTION ECONOMY WOULD ASK INSTEAD

Bailey’s reframe is not naive about capital — he is explicit that machinery, land, and credit still matter, and that money should not be pretended out of the picture. But he insists money should not be the only mechanism a country has for connecting a need to a solution that already exists nearby.

Applied to Guyana’s Bangladeshi and Cuban migrant populations, that reframe produces sharper questions than any Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorization letter has yet asked. Cuban medical personnel brought in to cover healthcare shortages – do they carry skills beyond the specific clinical role they were slotted into, that Guyana’s own strained health system could use if anyone had asked? A South Asian workforce imported for water-treatment plant construction, once the plants are commissioned and the contract ends, does that capability simply leave the country, or could it be connected to Guyana’s next infrastructure need, the next repair, the next skills gap in a sector far from GWI? Nobody has asked, because nobody has built a system designed to notice the answer.

Guyana does not currently have Bailey’s Pacorips — the AI capability-mapping system he has piloted informally in Brazil, matching people, needs, and idle resources without reducing anyone to one official occupation. It does not need to import his software to import his discipline. What Guyana lacks is not technology. It is the prior decision to ask the question at all: not is this person authorized to be here, and not did this company follow the rules that got them here, but what can these people, together with the Guyanese working alongside or instead of them, build that does not currently exist.

THE PIE QUESTION

Bailey’s closing formulation is the one worth sitting with longest: a country cannot build lasting prosperity by endlessly relitigating who gets the remaining slice of a fixed pie. Guyana’s public conversation about migrant labour — Cuban, Bangladeshi, Venezuelan, has been almost entirely a pie-slicing conversation: who authorized this, who benefited, who was cut out, who lied about when the first contract was signed. Those questions matter, and this paper will keep asking them, because accountability for the how is not optional.

But Bailey’s theory names the question sitting underneath all of it, one Guyana has not asked even once in public: what has arrived in this country, alongside the thin paper trail of authorization letters and NPTAB awards, that nobody has yet tried to use.

— The Board