Setting aside the customary ‘one off’ encounters between buyers and sellers designed to facilitate product-promotion and, more importantly, the rare but valued market for small businesses in several sectors, this weekend’s UNCAPPED event billed for the National Stadium at Providence, will provide an opportunity for innovative but still insufficiently embraced entrepreneurial enterprises to encounter representatives of the banking sector in the hope of cutting through the thicket of bureaucracy that continues to limit access for small businesses to financing for growth and expansion.
Almost certainly, though, it is unlikely that the representatives of the banking sector will turn up at Providence on Sunday with an altered script to that which has been read to small business owners attending the UNCAPPED event over the years. The fact that they have been invited to put in an appearance again this year, however, suggests that the organizers of the event, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) are still hopeful that there can be some sort of modus vivendi between the small cash-starved businesses and commercial banks that continue to assert that concern for their shareholders’ interests conditions their posture on small businesses that seemingly lack the wherewithal to comply with their lending conditions, which, the banks say, cannot be underpinned by a disposition of benevolence.
That apart, this Sunday’s UNCAPPED event, the GMSA’s most high-profile product promotion ‘outing,’ is not only expected to be heavily subscribed to by product producers offering food products, (both fruits and vegetables and agro-produce) condiments, cosmetics, costume jewellery and clothing, but is also likely to benefit from the presence of some of the bigger local outlets wanting to demonstrate a preparedness to respond to the clamour for greater shelf space on their premises for locally produced goods. And while it is almost certainly the case that what is, in fact, an opportunity for locally produced goods will have to ‘endure’ the presence of stalls offering cheap, mostly Chinese imports, the show will go on anyway, almost certainly under the watchful eye of the customary drone taking it all in from above.
Critically, this weekend’s fourth staging of the UNCAPPED event will afford an opportunity to assess the strides that the product producers, particularly the agro processors, have made in the area of market enhancement, whether in the area of substantive product quality or in product presentation. This newspaper is aware that both the Guyana School of Agriculture and the Guyana Marketing Corporation have been working with producers with the aim of realising improvement in these areas. With product presentation being a key element in pursuit of the enhancement of market access, particularly overseas market access, this newspaper has also been monitoring, particularly the display shelves at the GMC’s Guyana Shop, in order to determine the progress that has been made in the area of product presentation. While the days of recycled jam jars and paper labels are now behind us, it will take still more work for the local effort to catch up with the outcomes of the multi-million dollar investments in product presentation elsewhere, and which continue to provide formidable competition for local producers. Public product-promotion events of the nature of UNCAPPED do not customarily, benefit from any comprehensive and widely publicised post-event assessment designed to arrive at objective analyses of their outcomes. (It has been pretty much the same with GUYEXPO, GUYTIE.) So that while the energy, enthusiasm and public support provides an uplifting feeling, it is still difficult to gauge the impact of the outcomes on the event from the visible manifestations. Accordingly, it would be more than useful, if this year, the UNCAPPED event benefits from such an assessment if only to position its organizers to determine its strengths and weaknesses in the process of making the necessary adjustments.
The feedback that this newspaper has received from small businesses, many of whom have been featured in our product promotion coverage, suggests that UNCAPPED has been a positive development. Some even credit the event with having served to secure them some outlets that are now among their regular customers. With increased numbers of agro processers having placed their brands on the market in recent years, this year’s UNCAPPED event is almost certain to outdo its predecessor in terms of both producer and public participation. It is, however, the studied post-event assessment and evaluation that serves as a guide to the future of both UNCAPPED and its adherents, much more than the immediate-term media driven assessments of the outcomes that will be of greater value.
