PRESIDENT, Dr Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Brigadier (ret’d) Mark Philips on Monday met with more stakeholders (this time a team from the Guyana Innovation Group and representatives of Dar consultants) to discuss the visionary ‘Innovation Village’ masterplan for a geographic area, located within the planned ‘Silica City,’ where digital and innovative leading-edge anchor institutions and companies will cluster and connect with startups, business incubators and accelerators.
The new hi-tech city, far removed from the vulnerable coastline and near to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Soesdyke-Linden Highway and neighbouring Suriname, promises to be physically compact, transit-accessible, technically wired and offer mixed-use housing, office and retail spaces.
President Ali stressed the impact of the “catalytic investment,” noting that “The aim is to create opportunities for 2030 and beyond.”
The Silica City vision was unveiled in 2013 by President Ali while serving as Minister of Housing and Water and its construction starting about a decade later, is in keeping with Guyana’s international commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the New Urban Agenda and other guidelines.
Progress towards the city’s start has been constant from the beginning, attracting the interest and involvement government ministries and agencies, as well as many potential service providers and entrepreneurial stakeholders at all related levels, from all over Guyana.
The nation’s youth, vested with the technical capacities and thinking processes that drive innovations have advantages of producing ideas such as California’s Silicon Valley and others elsewhere – including India’s Bangalore, China’s Shenzen, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, Japan, The Philippines, North and South Korea, Vietnam — and Latin America, where El Salvador has established the world’s first Bitcoin capital.
Silica City Guyana is just one of the many unprecedented developments being undertaken by this PPP/Civic administration, that have demonstrated the stark differences between paying lip service to development and delivering development in new ways and means that equally cater for young and old, and introduce tomorrow’s city today, for the benefit of all.
Just like with the government’s continuing roll out of similarly unprecedented levels of support for Amerindian communities before, during and after Indigenous People’s Day and Amerindian Awareness Month, the connections to turn the bricks and mortar and locally-produced building structures and climate-resilient interventions to be injected, will also open the way for considering similar approaches by others in the Caribbean and beyond, who’re already eyeing Guyana’s silicon-city concept.
The GOAL academy is already providing the basis for those with eyes on and plans for Silica City to prepare themselves at several levels and this is yet another opportunity for starting development of the Youth Economy that regional leaders spoke of at the last CARICOM Summit in Suriname.
With most of the region’s youth below 31 years and technological capabilities never as high and opportunities never as wide, this is also a time when other CARICOM nations are paying similar attention to the benefits of at least one such city of tomorrow in each member-state.
The possibilities are countless and endless, as the new wired-up city will provide the bases for unleashing new waves of creativity, encouraged by rewards for life-changing and sustainable innovative solutions to old and new problems still haunting Guyanese and Caribbean people.
The President’s visionary “cataclysmic investment” idea now taking silicon shape is another of the many out-of-the-ordinary projects unveiled since 2020, aimed at making Guyana and the world see and feel the changes being introduced by a government living and moving with the times, instead of remaining anchored by outdated approaches to development, while the rest of the world moves on.
Forward to Silica City!
