While the Small Business Act of Guyana (2004) provides a legal context that both defines the small business and sets out the paradigms within which such businesses operate, the growth and development of the small business sector has not, up until now, advanced to a level that might have been anticipated. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them associated with the fact that those entities that we define as small businesses are a large, loose, and diverse group; they are held together by no institutional structure and many, perhaps most of them, are still to grow to the point where they generate sufficient confidence (and by extension, support) amongst key local business institutions, not least commercial banks and high profile Business Support Organizations, the latter having been set up to substantively serve the interests of larger businesses anyway.
Here in Guyana (as is the case in most other countries) small businesses are independent non-subsidiary operations that provide various types of goods and services on a limited scale, which is what separates them from medium-sized and large firms. Here, an explanation is required about numbers of employees. In developed countries the numbers can go as high as upward of one hundred. Here in Guyana most small businesses employ far more modest numbers, less than a dozen in many cases.