Development Finance Limited South America Inc (DFLSA) yesterday held a one-day investment conference focused on entrepreneurship and the business environment and a call was made for more proposals in agriculture from small and medium enterprises (SME).
The conference, which took place at Le Meridien Pegasus, looked at economic issues shaping the business environment in Guyana, private sector development in the Caribbean, SME internet-based lending and leasing, plans for supporting small enterprises and SME in the south eastern Caribbean.
Prakash Dhanrajh of DLFSA said: “We have been in the market for over two years and we wanted to pull together the small and medium enterprises. We wanted to update them on our services and plans for Guyana and also to get feedback from them on some of the challenges they faced in terms of getting their businesses going and expanding.”
He said that an SME advisor will spend nine months in Guyana speaking and working with the SME in the Guyanese private sector. The person will be helping the SMEs to put together top quality project proposals so that they could then approach either the banking system or the DFLSA for financing. “We believe that there is a lot of entrepreneurship in Guyana but not a lot of them have approached us for financing and for those who approach their business plan [lacks details],” he said.
He said that the client base is not as high as he would like it to be, but on an annual basis he would be happy to have 10 to 15 clients. He said that based on projections, “we are below that and we want to accelerate the pace.”
He added that now is a good time for proposals to be made. He said that the agency is also putting focus on agro-processing and noted their and clients’ participation in the recently-concluded Regional Agriculture Investment Forum.
Among the attendees at yesterday’s conference were representatives of SME organizations, donor agencies, non-governmental organisations and DFLSA.
