While we cannot but concede that oil and gas has, understandably, cornered the lion’s share of business reporting in 2019, the Stabroek Business’ focus on the small business sector over the past year has been a function its own deliberate and largely successful efforts to raise its national profile, considerable impediments and challenges notwithstanding. Those challenges have had to do, largely, with access to financing for growth and the absence of any really meaningful progress in accessing markets for locally manufactured products abroad.
In other areas, like product quality and product presentation there has been considerable improvement, though those improvements have come at significantly higher costs to the producer and, arguably, reduced competitiveness on the market.
There can be no question that the small business sector needs more support. Not that there has not been some backing for small business development from both the public and private sectors and here the Stabroek Business names the Small Business Bureau and the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association as, in our opinion, the standout agencies providing support to the small business sector in 2019.
In the instance of the former, its place on our honours roll derives not just from its continued disbursement of grants, albeit modest ones, to emerging small businesses but for the coaching, training and other forms of encouragement that it has afforded small businesses and which, in a few instances have contributed to the realization of markets abroad. In the case of the GMSA, its role in staging the series of UNCAPPED events, affording space and opportunity for small businesses to secure markets affords it a place on our 2019 standout local business development institutions.
In their own ways too, agencies like the Guyana School of Agriculture and the Guyana Marketing Corporation made their respective distinctive marks, the latter primarily through the marketing window that it has afforded new products through the Guyana Shop and the former through the various forms of technical training and production support that it has afforded emerging agro processors.
Perhaps the single biggest disappointment for the small business sector in 2019 was the failure to implement the provision in the Small Business Act intended to afford emerging businesses access to 20% of some categories of state contracts. That particular breakthrough would have likely set a number of small businesses on a path to meaningful growth and made a significant dent in the country’s unemployment figures. The implementation of this provision in the Small Business Act ought to be a high priority in 2020.
The outcomes, so far, of the protracted ‘high level‘ discourses between government officials and the GMSA reflected the customary sloth at which public/private sector tend to proceed and this too has to change, and quickly, if the overall state of health of the small business sector (and some of the more prominent sectors, as well) is to improve.
In more ways than one, what is certain to be an unerring focus on the oil and gas sector in 2020 ought to result in greater attention to the various ways in which that sector can realize more opportunities for local small businesses. What lies ahead is as much a challenge as it is an opportunity for our emerging entrepreneurs.
The prospects and opportunities that lie ahead, across the sectors are readily apparent though the returns will very much depend on the opportunities that emerge (and are taken advantage of) for small businesses to spread their wings.
