Even as micro and small businesses drawn predominantly from the agro-processing, handicraft, fashion, and light manufacturing sectors, express appreciation for the recent product display staged by the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) to coincide with the last week’s high profile oil & gas forum hosted by the Government of Guyana, participants continue to be concerned that their involvement in events of this kind are seen largely as decorative add-ons rather than initiatives that are planned and executed in a manner that make a meaningful contribution to helping them consolidate their respective entrepreneurial pursuits.
“What happens next is the real issue here. OK we have turned up with our products, some of the visitors for the conference have seen what we have to offer and we have sold small amounts of product. What happens next?” The arts and craft producer who raised this issue with the Stabroek Business seemed genuinely perplexed.
The story is really no different whichever exhibitor you engage, though one would have to be blind not to discern the sense of keenness and enthusiasm of the craftsmen and women and the manufacturers who live for moments like the recent Umana Yana event. They provide interludes of genuine exposure though, for the most part, they offer little beyond that in terms of having a longer-term breakthrough effect on their respective businesses. So that while the product promotion event had been ‘marketed’ as a kind of sideshow to the Oil and Gas Conference It turned out, particularly in its last few days, to be really no different to the occasional product- marketing events that bring local buyers and sellers together.
The official hype about government’s efforts to promote these types of businesses under an official umbrella has long lost traction with the manufacturers who contend that they cannot spend their lives relying on promises, most of which never seem to bear fruit. The Guyana Marketing Corporation ‘set up its stall’ at the Umana Yana too, though its presence there appeared to be reflective only partially of its role as a mentor to small businesses and aspiring small businesses. It was also trading goods in its own right.
There are, perhaps, a handful of worthwhile landmarks in the stunted growth of these types micro and small businesses in the aforementioned sectors, one of them being the strictly limited contribution which the state-run Small Business Bureau (SBB) has made to making smaller additional quantities of funding available to some sections of the micro and small business communities. Those funds, however, are woefully inadequate to match what government continually says are its ambitions for the micro and small business sectors. The second is the commendable but limited efforts that have been made by GMSA to include micro and small business in an embrace that seeks to enhance the public profile of ago-processing and some types of agro-processing by taking advantage of opportunities that might arise to bring those businesses to the attention of a larger potential market.
Still, for all the efforts of the GMSA, micro and small businesses in the agro-processing and the various craft and creative fields remain little more than a convenient showpiece to be ‘trotted out’ as and when the need arises, which is precisely why one would be hard-pressed to discern any significant growth across the sectors in recent years. Last week, the long-suffering producers were not exactly brooding though they were making no bones about the reality that it would be a good thing if, from time to time, there could be a closer correlation between enthusiasm and patronage.
Someone noted during a conversation between a handful of business owners and the Stabroek Business reporter on Friday that it had taken almost ten years to see the passage of legislation (The Small Business Act) metamorphose into the actual establishment of a Small Business Bureau. The substantive comment here was that for as long as rather than grant the SBB full autonomy and far more financing, government continued to “shackle” the institution to a muscle-bound Ministry of Commerce, then it cannot be expected to be responsive to the needs of the various sub-sectors that comprise the micro and small business sector.
The contemporary weaknesses are, truth be told, as clear as day. First, micro and small businesses lack the appropriate institutional framework to provide them with support in the various areas of business-building including those that have to do with structure, product choice, marketing strategy, and basic business training (wherever the latter is available it usually comes at a high price). Frankly, the greater part of the relationship between government and the development of micro and small businesses has always manifested itself at the level of political fluff designed to highlight the altogether contrived relationship between government and the growth of micro and small businesses. Recent evidence of this is to be found in the ‘hype and hoopla’ that attended the DPI’s coverage of a recent Region Six Farmers’ Market.
Interestingly, the assertive pronouncements made by Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha about the success of the Farmers’ Market contrasts sharply with his ministry’s deafening silence on the issue of the ministry’s failure to pay any meaningful attention to the opportunity afforded by the whole of 2021 to raise the national profile in the area of the production of fruits and vegetables (a matter on which this newspaper has previously commented). This notwithstanding the fact that the pursuits of a significant percentage of micro and small business in Guyana are linked to fruit and vegetable production and processing.
A continually emerging micro and small business sector has been unable, up until now, to attract the focused attention of the authorities in terms of better-positioning these to raise their game in areas that include all-round production proficiency specifically in areas such as enhanced production capabilities and product marketing. In much the same manner that local content pursuits continue to target some areas of the production process, this should be significantly adjusted to take greater account of emerging micro and small businesses in the sectors in last week’s Umana Yana product display.
