One of the issues that have arisen in relation to the highly touted US$5 million Micro and Small Enterprise and Building Alternative Livelihoods for Vulnerable Groups (MSE) project, funded by the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF), is what would appear to be the slow pace of the processing and disbursement of grants to beneficiaries.
Because of the concerns that have arisen and have been exhaustively debated in recent years regarding the scarcity of institutions for the financing micro and small privately run enterprises, this newspaper has been paying particular interest in the project. Our sources of information as regards the snail’s pace at which the grant approvals and disbursements are moving are some of those very small business owners who have been waiting—in some instances for years—to receive some form of financial support to kick start their respective ventures.
It may well be that the government has decided to save the approval and subsequent disbursement of a number of such grants for what it considers to be the opportune political moment, though that has to be balanced against the fact that, first, it has been more than a year now since the project was launched by President Donald Ramotar and, secondly, that the grant is a relatively small amount of money, $300,000. On the other hand, what we may be witnessing is yet another frustrating example of bureaucratic delay arising out of the fact that there are at least two levels of bureaucracy that administer the process and that in the final analysis the timing of disbursements is, in all likelihood, a function of political decision-making.
Perhaps the single saving grace in all this is the fact that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has an oversight role in the project and that, presumably, the bank is keen to try as best it can to ensure that critical project targets, including the creation of a certain number of jobs within a certain time frame are met. Accordingly, it is this newspaper’s view that the IDB itself has a responsibility to urge the executing agency to hasten the processing and disbursing of the grants. Here there are roles too for the subject Minister Irfaan Ali and perhaps even for President Ramotar, both of whom alluded to what they regard as the game-changing role that the project can play in the well-being of small businesses and in changing a small business culture which, for years, decades, has been beset by problems associated with a lack of financing.
The MSE Project was introduced to Guyanese as a mechanism for accelerating the growth of small business by circumventing the hurdles associated with accessing finance. Unless it proves its worth—and one way of doing so is to ensure that its procedures do not become buried in thickets of politics and bureaucracy—it runs the risk of being written off as just another state initiative that flattered to deceive.
