Quite unlike in some other countries in the region there does not exist in Guyana any organization, state-run or otherwise, that is singularly and demonstrably dedicated to the development of a robust micro and small business sector, these being the sectors with by far the largest numbers of full-time entrepreneurs. Here, we include the Small Business Bureau, for two reasons. First, because state allocations to the Bureau never even came close to satisfying its small business growth aspirations. Secondly, because it was always evident that the operating culture that usually attends the running of state institutions, including their convenient placement under the jurisdiction of government ministries, meant that the operating formula could never really function to the satisfaction of forward-looking private sector businesses.
There had always been, one feels, the possibility that our Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) – the PSC, the GMSA and the GCCI – might serve as mentors for micro and small businesses. These too, it seemed and particularly the PSC, had always been more concerned with their sense of status and the aloofness that attended that condition. In circumstances where there were simply either no qualified or no willing institution prepared to play a mentorship/business coaching role for micro and small businesses, these were placed in a kind of ‘swim or sink’ position. Needless to say the casualties were many.
These days, of course, our BSO’s have bigger fish to fry. There are the returns which members of our BSO’s expect to secure from the various Local Content-related opportunities and what this circumstance will inevitably do is to cause small and micro businesses to fall further behind.
Another point that we have made from time to time is that there is nothing wrong with allocating sums of tax dollars for the creation of an organization that is dedicated to the development of enterprises that dwell in a criteria-determined small and micro business category. Here, it should be said that since such a body will be financed by taxpayers’ money that there is nothing wrong with it being run by state-appointed professionals. In the instance of the Small Business Bureau the fact that it has been placed under the overall jurisdiction of a government ministry has, to a large extent, rendered it ill-suited to responding to the imperatives of significant numbers of private sector organizations.
When we speak of micro and small businesses we refer in the main to operations that would have been started with what the bigger businesses would regard as ‘pocket change,’ and some of which,, even as this editorial is being written, have been smitten by either the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, or else, kicked to the curb by a level of competition with which they have been unable to ‘live.’ If it used to be suggested not too many years ago that our established BSO’s might serve as reliable mentors for micro and small businesses, that notion, is now, far more than ever before, off the table, the movers and shakers in our BSO’s having long turned their fullest attentions to the more lucrative options that repose in the far richer pickings of the oil and gas sector.
One of the huge overall risks that repose in leaving the vast numbers of micro and small businesses to stand on their own in their present condition of mostly considerable weakness has to do with the likelihood that they will quickly be crushed in the mill of a new economy focused on conforming to the conventional survival-of-the-fittest business culture. That will leave a fair number of poor and malcontented behind. Accordingly, it makes every sense to allow businesses to grow and to prosper at every level of society so that while there will still remain differences in size and earnings we will at least have aspirants seeking to get to the top. Such a circumstance is likely to take us closer to a condition of poverty eradication, with all the various pluses that derive therefrom.
How to develop a more convivial relationship between the country’s vast army of micro and small businesses and our BSO’s is a challenge for the government itself. There are two areas in which those relationships will have to be developed. The first has to do with across-the-board mentoring initiatives that will help bring those many micro and small businesses up to speed with how to do business, to the extent that their enhanced proficiency can lift the viability of their operations. At the second level, there may well be a role for BSO’s in executing state-financed initiatives designed to enhance product promotion and market enhancement for micro and small businesses. This, one assumes, is an area in which the BSO’s ought not to be short of skills. Perhaps this can be realized through a circumstance of enhanced mentorship.
The question that arises is whether our BSO’s, given their ‘other preoccupations,’ can find either the time or the inclination to embrace such undertakings. If this turns out not to be the case then questions arise as to whether these are national bodies committed to serving the interest of the business community as a whole or whether their mindfulness is not solely with their individual business enterprises. These are questions that they will be required to answer, going forward.
With additional funding for financing this year’s budget scheduled to come from the country’s oil and gas earnings, it will, of course, be expected, that beyond increasing funding for the Small Business Bureau, (subject, hopefully to the significant restructuring of the organization and its removal from under ministerial jurisdiction) there will be other avenues through which micro and small businesses will benefit from material support, particularly on account of the devastating impact that these have had to absorb from the pandemic.
