By Valrie Grant Entrepreneur, Managing Director, GeoTechVision
Running your own business is a real career path, but in the Caribbean context traditional classrooms and curriculum aren’t set up for future entrepreneurs. Emphasis tends to be on training students to be employees and rule-followers, not preparing them to be leaders or to launch their own ventures. For sure, when we speak of rule followers we are not talking about the law, we are talking about following the norm of doing things the same way they have always been done even when the results are not giving the desired outcome. The outcome we need is economic growth and individual prosperity.
As a region we tend to not produce as many high-growth entrepreneurs. Is our education system partly to be blamed for this? Does our society give our youths permission to dream about a future without restrictions? Do we give our children the licence and the resources to imagine the impossible? Why aren’t more Caribbean nationals and particularly Guyanese not willing to venture out as entrepreneurs? Since being in Guyana I have heard many visitors to this country repeatedly saying, Guyana has so much potential! So with conditions seemingly so ripe for an economy fuelled by entrepreneurs, why are we not seeing its emergence on any large scale? And what can be done about that?
There may be many reasons but I will just mention a few of them:
- A general risk averse culture – being afraid to fail
- Attitudes of the Guyanese people
- Inadequate support structures
- Lack of policy to drive entrepreneurship.
Let’s examine these reasons. Risk is something that most persons fear. When we actually take some time to think about it, there are things we all do on a daily basis that are risky, yet we do them anyway as a normal part of our daily life. For example, we may take the chance to rush across a road in front of an oncoming vehicle to catch a taxi or a bus because we are late for work. Sometimes after doing it we may say “that was close.” But why did we do it? We saw an endgame which at the time was more important – getting the taxi to get to work on time otherwise we could be out of a job. When you think about it, going on the road is itself a risk, but we all do it daily because it is a necessity to accomplish anything in life. We must eat, feed our families and pay our bills. Similarly for economic growth and prosperity, risk must be taken because it is a necessity. If it is a necessity then we all have to a role to play. This is not to suggest that everyone should become an entrepreneur but we all need to be aware of the urgent need to enable and sustain entrepreneurship and do our part in contributing to an entrepreneurial culture. A societal mind-set change is required–one that sees entrepreneurial endeavours becoming the norm.
Countries that have significant economic growth or large economies tend to have more persons who were willing to take entrepreneurial risks. That is what drives economic growth and development. Make no mistakes about it, many failed in their initial endeavours–but talking to them now as billionaires, it was worth it! It is understandable that for most persons, after putting their little resources into a venture, if it fails the recovery can be very slow and sometimes very uncomfortable. This cannot, however, be such a strong deterrent from wanting to engage in entrepreneurial activities.
Attitude then has a big part to play as we work at positioning entrepreneurship as a real career choice. The attitude of Guyanese may also be a factor in the economy’s lacklustre performance despite so much potential. People need to create for themselves a vision, one where they see self-sufficiency, personal satisfaction and a purposeful existence as the endgame. It is important that we recognize that our attitude governs how we perceive the world and the way the world perceives us. So the power is in our hands to choose the attitude we will have. A positive attitude will allow us to forget about dependence on government, but at the same time hold it accountable for the purpose it should serve. It is necessary to adopt the attitude that says I am going to succeed no matter what. So we must believe in ourselves and our value as individuals. We all have value to contribute and we must ensure we put that value into personal and economic development. Even if failure comes we should see it as a valuable learning experience—a mere detour on that road to success but never a dead end!
Incentives that make entrepreneur want to start again after an initial failure are important to keeping a sustainable entrepreneurial environment. It means that encouragement is needed to keep following the dream. Maybe out of that failure comes an opportunity, but there needs to be support structures that help to unearth those potentials. It also requires institutions that provide incentives and opportunities for entrepreneurs to create and take risks. These institutions are developed through dialogue, experimentation, and a combination of grassroots and high-level reform initiatives.
Strong leadership and good governance are crucial to developing an entrepreneurial culture. Government must look at the existing policy and refine it or provide a new one that supports entrepreneurship at various levels. This should begin with stocktaking in terms of strengths and weaknesses of existing policies, programmes and structures. Then, on the basis of this review, government in collaboration with the stakeholders should design policies and programmes that contribute to the creation of a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem.
With policy and funding arrangements and other supporting structures in place, synergistic partnerships between industry, community, higher education institutions and government need to be enabled in order to leverage each partner’s expertise and strength.
Having the above ingredients in place is not a magic formula for the success of an individual entrepreneur but it certainly should result in a more enabling environment for entrepreneurial activities. It should also impact the quality of our entrepreneurs and ultimately impact the economic growth of Guyana.
If you have a question related to this article or just a general question on entrepreneurship, write to us at guyanabusinesswise@gmail.com . Your question may be addressed directly or in our next article.
