It is a few weeks short of three years since the then President, Donald Ramotar, launched the Micro and Small Enterprise Development (MSED) Programme in October 2013 with much aplomb at what is now the Arthur Chung Convention Centre.
The launch of the MSED Programme meant that for the first time since its passage in the National Assembly in October 2013, the government was able to give meaningful expression to the Small Business Act, insofar as providing significant financing for small business support was concerned. US$5 million had now become available under the Guyana Redd+ Investment Fund (GRIF) to finance the growth of local small and micro enterprises.
The launch of the MSED project created an audible hum in the local small business sector. For years, the sector had been bemoaning both the lack of official attention that it had been receiving and what it said was the tightfistedness of the local commercial banking sector’s response to applications for loans for consolidation and growth. The banks, of course, had their own story to tell.
With the MSED project having targeted a broad swathe of small business-related sectors including agriculture, agro-processing, manufacture and handicraft the initiative was regarded as an important multi-sectoral breakthrough though, from its very inception, its management style appeared to be heavily policed with bureaucracy and political oversight.
We are told, for example, that the Small Business Bureau, the agency created to administer the grants that had become available, has, up until now, trained 1000 young entrepreneurs, facilitated 63 commercial bank loans under its collateral support scheme and disbursed grants of $300,000.00 each to 193 recipients.
What had however been acknowledged publicly even before the project got underway was that its initial promise that the investment would generate more than 2000 jobs within two years was unlikely to bear fruit. More than that, however, the MSED project became shrouded in controversy associated with complaints of politically-motivated selectivity in the allocation of grants, criticism of both the relevance and quality of some of the training programmers delivered to recipients, and inadequate monitoring mechanisms to determine the progress which the grant recipients were making in growing their businesses.
The Bureau itself, meanwhile, had become increasingly conservative in its attitude to disseminating information in relation to the unfolding progress or otherwise of the small businesses that had been allocated grants.
As is customary when political administrations change, clouds of uncertainty tend to hang over the continuity of some inherited projects. For a while it was the same with the MSED project, though, eventually, it became clear that it would survive.
The road forward, however, had become an issue. A change of administration not only meant a change of some key personnel at the level of the Small Business Bureau but also a seeming overhaul of the overseeing agency, the Small Business Council. In August, the Ministry of Business, under which the project now falls, announced that it was appointing a new chairperson to head the Council that includes representatives of the Ministries of Finance and Business, the Linden Chamber of Commerce, the Guyana Small Business Association, the Guyana Craft Producers Association, the Institute of Private Enterprise Development, the Guyana Bankers Association and two small business owners.
While the new Council is yet to make public its strategic plan for improving the effectiveness of the Bureau and securing a clearer insight into just how the millions of dollars in grants have been spent to boost the small business sector, the available evidence suggests that we may well be in the midst of a fresh clamour by fledgling small business owners for support to help grow their businesses, which raises the question as to just how much faith there still is in the MSED project.
As an aside the point should be made that some of the very business support organizations created to assist the growth and development of the small business sector and which are members of the Small Business Council, are themselves under-resourced and otherwise lacking in capacity. Whether or not these are particularly well-positioned to provide really meaningful service at the level of the Small Business Council is questionable.
What is perhaps most needed at this juncture is a transparent assessment of the work that has been done by the Small Business Bureau since its inception and up to this time, particularly the details of its grant-disbursement regime and the extent to which the funds disbursed have impacted on small business growth over the period. That would entail, among other things, a case by case assessment of the particular progress that each beneficiary of the grant scheme has made. Frankly, there may well be a credibility gap that has arisen out of the failure of the Bureau, the Council or both to provide any real progress report on what is, in effect, the biggest single investment in the small business sector. A major, image-retrieving public disclosure that includes information on just how many jobs the project has created up to this time is urgently needed.
