NETWORKING, engaging and lobbying across the world opens up tremendous doors, and generate new opportunities and possibilities for Guyana to push its interests and development agenda on the global scene. For this, the country’s consulates, high commissions, and embassies play an invaluable, important, vital role. With the nation facing an imminent ascent in its status on the world stage as a fast-rising oil-and-gas producer, the need for increasing Guyana’s influence on the world stage would become more and more important. The far-flung global Guyana foreign affairs corps of diplomats, staff, and advisers and experts could play a defining role in not only generating a worldwide buzz of excitement for Guyana, but also create global partnerships and investment avenues and symbiotic relationships with other countries and powerful organisations.
Guyana’s foreign service network around the world offers a dynamic platform for the country to play on the global playground. This platform offers three big benefits: Building Guyanese influence across the world; promoting, marketing and scaling the Guyana brand; and connecting a pipeline through which investments and other benefits flow to the country, and into local communities.

Today, Guyana’s goodwill on the world stage is second to none, and investments are flowing into the country with lightning speed. It is the start of a process that will become more and more sophisticated as the country moves up in the world. The nation would do well to prepare for this.
Guyanese see the local diplomatic corps of the big nations, the US, England, the EU, Canada, China, India, et al playing a super-influential role in Georgetown, not only representing the interests of their country, but also taking an active interest in Guyana’s development and progress, and lobbying for Guyana to align with their home-front interests. These countries show how important is the role of the foreign services corps in a country’s journey.
The world now functions as one global community, interconnected and intertwined and interwoven on every level, from economics to culture, social values and political norms. Every country in the world operates under international conventions and agreements, from trading rules to human rights and humane values. Every country in the world signs on to the global values that the United Nations administers. Hence, it is a globalised world, and as an emerging well-developed country, Guyana would do well to position itself from now to play large on the global scene. The organisation for this is the Guyana Foreign Service Corps.

In New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Florida, London, all over the world, and more and more the Middle East, as oil and gas ramps up, Guyana operates its consulates, embassies and high commissions. The platform is already there; well established. These offices tend to serve as interface between diaspora Guyanese communities and their homeland, providing services like passport processing and renewal of official documents. But these foreign offices are yet to develop a strong branding structure for Guyana’s goodwill to be pushed out to their international cities of operation. And now that Guyana has become so attractive to foreign investors, these foreign service offices could develop workshops, conferences, seminars, and other outreach events and strategies to showcase the nation’s opportunities to the world.
These foreign service offices connect Guyana to the world; they form an international platform that serves as the face of the nation, but also as a valuable resource for communicating the Guyana Government’s vision, development agenda, and opportunities for global engagement with the worldwide community. They cannot see themselves only as foreign service specialists, but as the country’s branding ambassadors, goodwill creators, and proponents of Guyana as the best place on earth.

These foreign service offices would do well with a Public Relations Officer in each one, and a graphics design department to create social media content, with writers who create engaging content, based on what is going on in the homeland, and posted regularly Online. These foreign service entities become the media centre, marketing agent, and public relations field office for the nation. Guyana would eventually look to staff these offices not only with diplomats and relevant office staff, but cultural ambassadors and public communications specialists who promote Guyanese books and movies and art and sculpture; the story of the nation. In other words, the foreign service offices are the global branches of Guyana, reaching across the world into all corners of the earth, with the ability and resources and structure to tell the Guyana story.

Guyana has a global resource base within its foreign service offices that offers much more than foreign policy work and diplomacy, but offers the opportunity for outreach into the communities in which they operate; reaching out to the Chambers of Commerce in Toronto, New York, and London, for example, and to professional organisations. The possibilities are endless.
Every country in the world today knows the value of networking, lobbying, and engaging with the world community, and many do it through their foreign service offices. In fact, this is how the big nations maintain their global influence; continually attract major foreign investments and aid and grants, and develop symbiotic relationships that become fruitful.
With the Guyanese diaspora flung out across the earth today, Guyana is in a beautiful position to ride the wave of its new-found fame and fortune; cultivate its foreign service offices as efficient branding centres of the unfolding Guyana story, and furnish every corner of the global village with constant outreach and contact. Such a journey starts now, with this blessed nation on the cusp of becoming an important member of the 21st Century world community.