It is not often that the country’s major Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) pay focussed attention specifically to women in business. In fact, over the years, BSO’s and even more so their executives have been dominated by men and while one assumes that women-run businesses benefit from such gains as the Private Sector Commission (PSC) for example realises from its broader negotiations with government, women have not been generally known to hold positions of any great influence in the leadership of the BSO’s.
Here, this newspaper’s personal experience with BSO’s allows it make an exception for the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) which, in recent years, has, through its UncappeD events, done quite a bit to bring the local agro-processing sector to the fore and as it happens the agro-processing sector comprises, to a considerable extent, emerging businesses that are managed overwhelmingly by women. Indeed, one recalls that it was the earliest UncappeD initiative that gave a great many of those small women-run businesses their first real major market exposure and (along with the Small Business Bureau) provided the opportunity for some of those women to shine at the subsequent GuyTIE event at the Marriott Hotel.
While we have provided few details of this evening’s ‘connecting women in business’ cocktail reception being hosted by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), we certainly believe that any initiative that seeks to promote the interests of women in business is a worthwhile one. In this context we trust that we will be forgiven for what may well be the perception that we particularly favour the opportunity that it affords women in small and medium scale agro-processing (assuming that they are on the GCCI’s guest list) to interact with the more established business persons whom, we assume, will be at tonight’s event. Such encounters, insofar as we are aware, do not regularly take place so that whenever they do, one hopes that the exchanges are fulsome and that they allow for fruitful interaction between the small business persons and the bigger business people.
The fact that there is no known umbrella organisation housing women agro-processors, for example, is particularly unfortunate. Few sub-sectors in the business sector as a whole have made greater progress in the growth of their respective businesses – comparatively speaking, that is – in recent years. One senses, however, that their growth would have been even more substantial if they had been able to benefit from an umbrella organisation that would have afforded them the guidance that they need in the discipline of managing a business. Small businesses in the agro-processing sector, among others, also need a strong lobbying force behind them in areas like accessing commercial bank lending for business development and accessing markets abroad for their finished products.
The reality is that on the whole, our high-profile BSO’s have not paid nearly sufficient attention to helping our small and micro businesses to find their feet. The situation, for example, with regard to such businesses becoming members of the BSO’s remains fuzzy even though we are aware that the issue has arisen from time to time, at the level of the GCCI specifically.
Regional and global opportunities for the consolidation of markets for our agro-processed goods, particularly, more than justify BSO’s paying greater attention to these smaller operators. Indeed, there may well exist a case for a special window within the Chamber or the GMSA that can accommodate our small manufacturers. Arising out of such arrangements can come opportunities for technical assistance, the upgrading of skills, expanding markets and securing more ready access to finance, which are among the primary weaknesses in the small manufacturing sector.
So that while we say again that we know little about this evening’s reception save and except that it is being hosted by the Chamber’s ‘Membership and Diversity Committee’, we certainly note with interest “the Chamber’s mission to empower more women to take up leadership positions in the private sector” which, over the years and on the basis of the available evidence, has not, hitherto, been a priority. We are further told that the aim of this evening’s event is “to offer professional women [and one assumes that-agro processors fall into that category] a unique opportunity to network and make valuable business connections.” We applaud the initiative though the Chamber but our BSO’s must keep reminding themselves, in the words of Aristotle, “One swallow does not a summer make.”
