Every capital is courting Guyana. The question a country of under a million people has to answer first is how much of the money it can actually hold onto.

Washington held its own investment forum for Guyana this month, on 17 July, co-hosted with the Business Council for International Understanding, with Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau there to press the American case. It was the latest in a queue. US trade with Guyana has topped $25 billion over the past decade, and the pitch now runs well past oil, into agriculture, IT and security. A country of fewer than a million people has more governments organising forums for it than it can comfortably seat. Whatever Guyana's problem is, it is not getting the world's attention.

The scale of what it is absorbing is hard to overstate. Real GDP has grown an average of roughly 47% a year since 2022, on the back of the ExxonMobil-led offshore fields: 63% in 2022, 34% in 2023, and the IMF still projects around 16% for 2026 and something near 14% a year across the next five. No economy on earth is growing faster. And yet the money does not stay. Net foreign direct investment runs negative, because the profits from the oil sector are repatriated to the operators as fast as the barrels come up. The gross inflow builds platforms in deep water off the coast; the earnings sail back to head office. Which reframes the whole problem. For Guyana the contest was never how much capital it could attract. It was how much of the activity it could hold onshore.

The instrument for that is unglamorous, and it is the part worth studying. Guyana's Local Content Act, passed in 2021, reserves 40 categories of goods and services in the oil and gas supply chain for Guyanese firms, everything from catering, accommodation and transport to insurance, legal and accounting work, with prescribed local participation running from 5% up to 100% depending on the category. To bid in a protected line, a company has to hold a Local Content Certificate from a dedicated Secretariat. The timing is the whole point. Guyana legislated this in 2021, before production ramped to its current pace, not in the rear-view mirror after the boom had already picked its winners. More than 1,300 firms are now on the register, and procurement steered to Guyanese companies and nationals has passed $1.5 billion. That is the slice of the boom the country keeps.

The other half of capture is building an economy that exists when the oil price wobbles. Strip out crude and Guyana's non-oil economy is set to grow about 10.8% in 2026, led by construction at roughly 25% and manufacturing near 13%, with agriculture around 8%. The government has put GY$113 billion behind farming this year and talks openly about becoming the breadbasket of the Caribbean, alongside a gas-to-energy project meant to pull power costs down for everyone else. This is where absorptive capacity actually shows up as plants, farms and megawatts, and it is now growing at double digits on its own steam rather than as a rounding error on the oil line.

None of which makes the absorption automatic. The IMF's own reading flags the risk sitting underneath the growth: overheating, and the Dutch-disease pull on the non-tradable sector, the labour and price pressures that come when a tiny economy tries to spend a windfall faster than it can build. Absorptive capacity is a real ceiling, not a figure of speech. The local-content registry is one guard against hitting it badly. A sovereign savings fund, the Norway model Georgetown keeps invoking, is the other. Neither is a substitute for the machinery being in place before the capital lands.

For a practitioner the lesson travels past oil, to any agency courting or being courted by a single large, externally-driven project, a mine, a smelter, a hyperscaler campus. Guyana's move was to build the registry before the boom: reserve the categories, certify the local firms, publish the procurement, so that when the capital arrives there is a domestic supply chain ready to catch the spend rather than watching it fly in on expatriate contracts and fly out again as profit. The forums and the state visits this month were the easy, visible part. The quiet law Guyana wrote in 2021 is the part that decides what the country actually gets to keep, and it is the companion to any Doyen Report on turning one anchor project into a local supply chain.