Although the Guyana Small Business Associa-tion (GSBA) deserves a measure of credit for putting together the recent forum at which the President of the Small Enterprising Business Association (SEBA) of Trinidad and Tobago Jonathan Adams made an enlightening presentation on the role that small business plays in that country, the fact that the forum attracted no more than a handful of people, many of whom cannot be described as small business owners in the true sense of the word, was a disappointment.
Trinidad and Tobago is “streets” ahead of Guyana as far as the effective organizing of the small business sector is concerned and this appears to have nothing to do with the strength of that country’s economy. What is apparent is that SEBA has been much more successful in mobilizing small businesses across Trinidad and Tobago into an effective lobbying force which the government has been unable to ignore. The returns for SEBA’s efforts appear to have been considerable.
For example, in Trinidad and Tobago legislation exists that allows for the allocation of a percentage of state contracts to small businesses; small business representatives sit on various state boards in that country and SEBA receives paid contracts from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to provide training in business-related skills. Additionally, SEBA, has responded to the problem of limited small business access to commercial lending by establishing a credit union of its own that provides funding for small business ventures.
The point that Mr Adams was seeking to make is that what has made the small business sector in Trinidad and Tobago so successful is the quality of its leadership and a recognition that even in the oil-rich economy of Trinidad and Tobago the state cannot ignore a well-organized private sector.
It was clear that Mr Adams was seeking to make a point to the GSBA and to the small business sector in Guyana about the posture that they must assume if they are to arrive at a point where they can come to be regarded as a potent force in the Guyana economy. No one, including the GSBA, has even the remotest idea how many small businesses there are in Guyana. More to the point there appears to be no clear consensus as to what the criteria are for a small business in the first place.
True, there are thousands of subsistence producers across the country engaged in poultry, craft, and other areas of production. Most of these proceed without business plans, management systems, accounting regimes or marketing plans and can therefore hardly be considered businesses – small or otherwise – in the conventional sense.
Part of the problem clearly lies in the absence of strong institutional support for small business that can, not only mobilize small producers but can also provide those producers with the know-how that is necessary to transform their subsistence operations in real businesses.
The Institute of Private Enterprise Development (IPED) for all its efforts is not a small business association. It is a lending institution that provides other services that can help clients – and, admittedly, others – to run their businesses more efficiently and therefore better equip them to repay their loans.
These observations are not intended to disregard the efforts of small, energetic, well-intentioned producers. The fact is, however, that many, perhaps most small businesses in Guyana appear stuck at the small business stage. It is true, for example, that many of these continue to be given short shrift by the local commercial banking system. The other side of the coin, however, is that many of them lack even the basic credentials to qualify for commercial bank loans.
Apart from the fact that the institutional mechanisms that ought to have emerged from the passage of the Small Business Act to support the small business sector in Guyana are yet to really see the light of day, it has to be assumed that accessing help even from a state-funded support facility will depend on meeting certain criteria.
That leaves small businesses themselves – along with organizations like EMPRETEC and the GSBA – with much work to do to determine, in the first place what constitutes a small business, to equip small producers with the skills to wean them away from their current subsistence existence, to create alternative sources of funding for small businesses (the promised GSBA credit union is yet to materialize more than a year after the announcement that it was being set up) and to mobilize them into a coherent group that would cause both the government and the commercial lending system to take them more seriously.
As Mr Adams puts it in his presentation last week it would do little good for weak and unorganized small businesses to bellyache about the paucity of state support. It is their collective clout and not their individual grumbling that will get them the attention they seek. Leadership, sadly, would appear to be lacking.
