Business Editorial
Towards the end of last year a determined Guyanese businesswoman who rose to a position of more than modest success in the local freight forwarding industry was named among the ten top performers in the UNCTAD/EMPRETEC Women in Business Award for female entrepreneurs in developing countries.
The accolade is still to attract the plaudits from the rest of the business community which it so richly deserves. Ms Lucia Desir’s company, D&J Shipping, was selected as one of the top ten performers among women in business in developing countries from across the globe, including countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This, incidentally, is the second year in which this accolade has been bestowed on a female Guyanese entrepreneur, the first being Ms Irene Bacchus-Holder, a Linden-based art and craft designer, who was named among the top ten performers in 2008.
When we consider the challenges that still confront Guyanese women seeking to make their way in the world of entrepreneurship the accomplishments of Ms Desir and Ms Bacchus-Holder are more than worthy of the highest praise. This newspaper has engaged both women and has heard and published stories about the challenges that have confronted them on their way to some measure of national recognition and of their steely determination to stay the course; to remain resolute in their resolve to overcome those challenges.
In the case of Ms Bacchus-Holder her road to recognition was littered with challenges associated with acquiring raw material, training assistants, equipping herself with the tools of her trade and seeking to attract international markets for her outstanding works of art and craft. Sometimes alone, other times with the support of the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) she trekked to international trade fairs to display her goods and expand her market. We remember too the elements of class and quality which her creations brought to the 2007 Cricket World Cup display and sale of Guyanese craft.
Ms Desir chose to enter a sector that has been traditionally dominated by men and while she concedes that her male counterparts have not been a hindrance to the growth of D&J Shipping she, too, has had her travails which have included near devastation of her freight forwarding operation during the 2005 floods and her determined struggle to persuade a local commercial bank that she was worthy of its backing. For both these women the road to recognition has not been easy.
But there is another twist to this inspiring story. Both Ms Bacchus-Holder and Ms Desir owe the international recognition they have received to the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development (UNCTAD) institution EMPRETEC which has centres in a number of developing countries, including Guyana, that provide training in various disciplines associated with managing a business. Ms Desir, particularly, talks about the role that EMPRETEC has played in building her business skills; in teaching her several of the core disciplines associated with the management of a business enterprise and of helping her to build D&J to a level where it has now attracted international recognition.
Here we have two praiseworthy Guyanese women, whom, through their own hard work and through the intervention of a high-quality coaching programme provided by EMPRETEC, have put the Guyanese business community on the international map so to speak and whose accomplishments will, in their own way, serve not just to place both them and their goods and services on the wider global stage but also to help market Guyana as a country with which the rest of the world can do business. For this, these two deserving women and the Guyanese business community as a whole must give more than a modest measure of credit to the driving force behind the local EMPRETEC programme, its Managing Director, another Guyanese woman, Ms Judy Semple-Joseph.
We believe that those hundreds of Guyanese women who seek, often against formidable obstacles, to find their respective ways in the world of business can take much heart and example from the accomplishments of Ms Desir, Ms Bacchus-Holder and Ms Semple-Joseph.