As Guyana’s economy continues to expand, development organisations are being encouraged to think beyond the immediate benefits of grant funding and consider how the services they provide can continue reaching communities long after those grants have ended.
That was one of the key messages delivered by Zaki Raheem, Senior Director of Programmes at the Miller Center for Global Impact, during the Greater Guyana Initiative’s (GGI) Stakeholder Forum 2026 at the Guyana Marriott Hotel on Friday.
Raheem told participants that while funding can help organisations deliver important services, long-term impact depends on their ability to build partnerships, explore sustainable ways of operating and demonstrate that their work is making a measurable difference.
He outlined three priorities for organisations: investing in partnerships, exploring new business models and making impact credible.
“Guyana's rapid growth is creating extraordinary opportunities. And making that growth inclusive also takes the work represented here,” Raheem said.
He noted that organisations working in areas such as health, education, agriculture, water and community development have an important role in ensuring that people can participate in and benefit from the opportunities emerging in Guyana.
However, he cautioned that organisations should not focus only on completing the activities outlined in a grant. They must also consider what happens when that funding comes to an end.
Raheem used examples from Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Namibia and Nigeria to demonstrate how organisations have adapted their approaches through partnerships and new ways of generating income.
In Ghana, an agricultural technology incubator programme that began with a one-off grant expanded its reach through partnerships with universities, law firms, management consultants and commercial farms.
Raheem said the initiative eventually grew into what he described as West Africa’s largest agri-tech incubator, training 65,000 young people and launching more than 100 start-ups.
In Namibia, a civil society organisation that received funding to provide low-cost, waterless toilets to rural communities explored additional ways to generate income. It began leasing toilets to schools, working with municipalities and renting them for events.
Those revenue streams helped the organisation break even and continue serving communities that needed the service.
For Guyanese organisations, Raheem said the lesson is to identify potential partners beyond their usual networks and consider who else could help them sustain or expand their work.
He encouraged training institutions to work more closely with employers to create pathways to employment, while conservation groups could combine community knowledge with technical expertise to protect ecosystems and strengthen livelihoods.
He also challenged organisations to examine who benefits from their services, who is able to pay for them and what arrangements could keep those services operating over the next five, 10 or even 15 years.
That could involve public budgets, corporate support, service contracts, earned revenue or a combination of funding sources.
The third priority, making impact credible, was equally important, particularly as organisations seek to attract new funders and investors.
Raheem said counting the number of people trained or sharing photographs of completed activities is not enough to establish whether a project has delivered lasting benefits.
“It needs to be more than a success story. It needs to be more than a few photos,” he said.
He explained that organisations should assess whether people are actually using the skills they acquired through training, whether communities continue to benefit from services and whether those outcomes can be reliably measured.
For example, an organisation should be able to show not only how many people participated in a training programme, but whether participants applied what they learned weeks or months later.
Raheem said organisations should develop systems to track those results at a reasonable cost, noting that technology and artificial intelligence could help smaller organisations collect and analyse information.
He also acknowledged that traditional development funding has declined, while impact investing and venture philanthropy are growing in the Caribbean. These funding sources, he said, place importance on evidence that an organisation can demonstrate meaningful results.
The discussion formed part of the GGI Stakeholder Forum, which brought together implementing entities and other stakeholders to reflect on development work and consider how its benefits can be sustained.
The Greater Guyana Initiative is a US$100 million initiative funded by ExxonMobil Guyana, Hess Guyana Exploration and CNOOC Petroleum Guyana. It supports programmes in education and training, community health, and economic development and diversification.
Among the achievements highlighted at the forum were more than 2,000 women and girls accessing cancer screening services, 18,000 students receiving purified water through Project FLOW, 26 instructors from 11 technical and vocational education institutions gaining internationally recognised health and safety qualifications, and more than 1,100 poultry farmers receiving training.
For Raheem, the challenge facing organisations is to ensure that these interventions are not viewed only as activities completed under a grant, but as opportunities to build lasting capacity and improve lives.
He urged participants to leave the forum identifying at least one new potential partner, one arrangement they could test to strengthen the sustainability of their work and one additional measure that could help demonstrate the benefits their projects are delivering.
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