Spent the last three days in Guyana scouting out problems in the country. The country struck oil a few years ago and development—housing, roads, buildings, industry—has skyrocketed. Tons of migrant workers have entered the country to find work—potentially even making 20% of the real population. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build up a country's infrastructure from scratch.
(1) The Guyanese Stock Exchange (GSE) is fully paper-based. For a normal citizen to invest in Guyanese securities, they have to walk to the GSE building and fill out a form. The bid-ask book is done by hand. The market is super illiquid and lagged. To invest in foreign securities, you have to call your guy in the Bahamas who executes the trade on your behalf. You can't click a button on your phone to buy stocks.
(2) Theres a major skilled labor allocation problem. To build roads, buildings, and houses, electricians, plumbers, masons, etc. are needed. But they are impossible to find. Developers scour Facebook, WhatsApp, put up physical posters (that 100 passerby see/day maximum), and reach out to anyone within two degrees of their social network to find contractors. Since the contractors probably have 20 developers trying to hire them at any moment, they inflate the price they are paid by 1.5-2x. And the only way to become skilled is to go through trade schools (rapidly growing in number). Wall ports blow out all the time and blackouts are common. It's very hard for a developer to know if their contractors are actually qualified—the exchange is purely trust-based. You ask a laborer if they can do electrician shit and it's obvious if they know what they are doing once you see them work. But there's no market mechanism for developers to "review" contractors, the same way riders rate Uber drivers. The true market value of labor isn't realized since the market is so illiquid.
(3) The University of Guyana — probably the only university in Guyana? — relies on tutors to help students in discussion section outside of lecture. To lecture, you must have a masters degree or PhD. To tutor, you must have a bachelors degree (with a few exceptions of upperclassmen). Tutors are paid $30K USD/yr ($15K/semester); despite that high pay, the university can barely find any. The graduated engineers find much higher pay in the booming oil industry so there is little incentive to teach students.
(4) Agriculture is quickly growing—the largest agricultural export is rice. Hundreds of millions of dollars of rice is exported, but the largest rice farm sells 5 figures worth of rice, so there is a high distribution of small-scale farmers. All of the farmers funnel harvested crop to five companies that process the crop and sell it. There are no way for farmers to secure their income for the year (via a futures contract) since yield data isn't collected, the industry is too distributed, and the Guyanese culture is very risk-averse. Farmers are scared to get loans from the Small Business Administration even when the interest rate is way lower than commercial banks/foreign lenders, paying the loan back is pretty secure because of stable cashflow, and the loan would pump their production by 2x.
(5) Most of the economy is paper-based. There are only three payment providers in the country and people prefer to use cash over credit cards. Prepaid debit cards are more common, but the credit-aversion is probably adjacent to the general risk-aversion, which is impossible to tell when you see how people drive.
(6) People don't like apps. Most people are on Facebook and Whatsapp, for the social element, and the young people are on every app that young people in the US are on. Websites are totally off-limits. This will probably change in 5-10 years, but an app probably won't lead to a quick cash-grab. The country hasn't had it's India/China moment yet.
The country strongly reminds me of India—trash everywhere, lots of poverty, cows and dogs chilling on the streets, rowdy driving, humid climate, and lots of Indians. The Guyanese creole and social dynamic is super cool too—I feel like I've gotten 2x funnier and better at comebacks since being here.
Thinking of (1) building a tool to double the productivity of tutors, letting them tutor 1.5-2x the number of students, fixing the tutor scarcity problem. And building the (2) Guyanese Stock Exchange infrastructure from scratch, (3) making a Robinhood app to bridge the gap between citizens and investing in securities, and (4) creating a market-maker to keep market liquidity high since the volume of investments won't be high right now (~800K population, most living on <$7K USD/yr)