Guyana will soon be partnering with an expert out of Ghana, who has vast experience in working with Sovereign Wealth Funds. This was recently disclosed by Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan, who noted that his expertise will be ideal for helping Guyana establish the Public Accounts Committees within the framework of the fund.
Even though he is confident that the fund will be operationalized in time for first oil, Mr. Jordan did point out some challenges currently faced by the Government in this process. This is why he believes the partnership with Ghana will be crucial.
He explained that, “Though, it is a fairly large committee, we couldn’t send letters out to all of them. and some of the representatives on that committee would pose some challenge in terms of who would be the nominee for the youth, women, civil society, etc. There is no specific youth, women or civic society group you can point to, so we have to get some examples of how Ghana did theirs.”
To this end, Guyana/Ghana collaboration will see a workshop being held in September with all the major stakeholders of the fund.
“This is of course part of ongoing efforts to get it right…We are thinking now of even broadening the participation to other sectors so that we have one grand meeting that can have the expertise of Ghana and International firms so hopefully we can get it going sometime in September,” Mr. Jordan stated.
Arnold McIntyre, who recently led a team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to Guyana, has also offered to help the country with the operationalization of the fund.
“He had offered to bring somebody from the fund or come himself to help with the education, explanation and management so that we bridge operational gaps,” the Finance Minister said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Jordan is currently in Malta attending a high-level meeting hosted by the Commonwealth and he said, “I plan to engage officials there on support for the operationalization of the fund.”
