The Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest), the lead agency responsible for creating an enabling environment for investment promotion in Guyana is to undergo a wide-ranging overhaul, designed to better position the entity to draw an enhanced level of investor attention to Guyana, Stabroek Business has learnt.
During an exclusive interview with this newspaper on Wednesday, the agency’s Chief Executive Officer Keith Burrowes, who recently relinquished the position of Chairman of the entity’s Board of Directors, disclosed that the decision to “overhaul” Go-Invest was taken against the backdrop of a recognition of the need to fashion “an agency that can match investor expectations and maximize investor interest” in what Guyana has to offer. Burrowes said the exercise aimed at, among other things, “re-tooling Go-Invest,” was “a work in progress” and that the process of “transforming” the agency would take place “even as it continues to discharge its functions.”
The disclosure that significant change is on the cards for Go-Invest comes against the backdrop of separate bouts of public criticism of the agency’s performance, though Burrowes said the overhaul exercise was “a reflection of careful and calculated official introspection” rather than “a response to any kind of pressure created outside of the entity.”
However, the Go-Invest Head did not deny that the entity was facing “various weaknesses and shortcomings” which he said had “impacted negatively on its ability to fully execute its mandate.” He added that it was the official recognition of the importance of private investment to the forward movement of the country’s economy that had influenced the decision to re-tool the entity that is at the centre of “sustaining an efficient investment infrastructure.”
Burrowes told Stabroek Business that the move to re-examine the operations of Go-Invest was not intended to send a message that the organization was dormant. “The public should know, for example, that during 2014 the agency handled more than US$800 million worth of investment applications. Some of them have been implemented and were already contributing to the economy and to employment in particular and others were being reviewed. I think that this is particularly significant when account is taken of the fact that investment in some of the major sectors of the country’s economy including gold and agriculture are not handled by Go-Invest. It suggests that, overall, there is an impressive level of investor interest in Guyana.”
Keith Burrowes
Stabroek Business has seen an official document titled ‘Recommendations for Modernization and Restructuring of Go-Invest’ which cites “management and leadership issues,” and “inadequate human resource capacity” as well as the absence of a “central database system… to collect and manage investor information, client information, tracking and report generation” as current challenges to meeting the organization’s mandate. Additionally, the document lists “the absence of an information clearing house facility for investment facilitation in Guyana” as another of the critical challenges confronting Go-Invest.
On the issue of leadership Burrowes said that the problems in that area were not intended to cast aspersions on the performances on some of the entity’s senior and experienced officers. As far as leadership is concerned the problems have centred around “difficulties at the top” after Geoff Da Silva’s departure.
Burrowes told Stabroek Business that there was a sense in which Go-Invest had had to operate in a less than enabling environment and without some of the “critical tools” with which to engage investors. “I believe there is a clear recognition that that has to end. The whole idea behind the restructuring exercise is to have an agency whose results can be more accurately measured in terms of the volume of investment that the country can attract,” Burrowes said.
Among the key “modernization and restructuring” initiatives alluded to by Burrowes are a review of the existing investment incentives, enhanced collaboration with Guyana’s overseas missions in an effort to improve the levels of foreign direct investment and the creation of a new interactive website. “One of our more critical pursuits will be to further clarify Go-Invest’s role and, equally importantly, to implement a programme to address language differences between Go-Invest and investors. Allied to this the agency will be seeking to recruit strong and focused candidates to fill leadership positions,” Burrowes said.
Go-Invest was established under the Public Corporations Act in 1994 as a semi-autonomous agency under the purview of the Office of the President and charged with responsibility for investment facilitation and promotion and export promotion. Its key responsibilities include serving as a primary contact for investors and liaising with state agencies throughout the investment process and providing investors with information regarding the steps necessary to commence business operations in Guyana and helping them to undertake those steps. In its export promotion role Go-Invest has planned and executed participation by groups of local businesses in international trade promotion events designed to maximize exposure of their goods and services to international markets.
“I believe it would be true to say that, over the years, while overseas investors and local entrepreneurs would have benefited from the work of Go-Invest, it is also true that over time we have also seen the operational limitations of the institution. Some of the problems that afflict the agency today are a function of the fact that it had been left with strong and effective leadership for an extended period of time,” Burrowers told Stabroek Business.
And according to Burrowes, less than adequate emphasis had been placed on the export promotion component of Go-Invest’s mandate. “We have had some difficulties in that particular area and that is certainly one of the areas to which we will be paying a great deal of remedial attention in the broader overhaul process,” he said.
Burrowes said Go-Invest had recently completed publication of its first published bi-annual report, covering the period 2010-2011 and that a second report covering the period 2012-2013 will be completed by June this year. “One of the things [the] reports help to do is to serve as a guide to how we proceed in the period ahead taking account of the operational shortcomings that we have identified,” Burrowes said.
Meanwhile, Burrowes told Stabroek Business that a key objective of the restructuring exercise will be to better position the entity to migrate from, being “a referral system that is not fully satisfying its mandate to an organization which acts as a governing body on the scope of investment in the country.”
