With oil and gas related entrepreneurial opportunities having fixed world class business breakthroughs in the minds of the bigger players in the Guyana economy, the recent announcement by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) of its week-long Small Business Week, commencing on Saturday May 29th serves as a timely reminder to the local business community that lucrative entrepreneurial pursuits do not stop at oil and directly oil-related sectors.
There is almost certainly no oil-producing country, globally, that has not benefitted from the expanded economies that have derived from the oil and gas sector and even in what are still its ‘tender years’ as an oil-producing countries there is clear evidence that it has brought both direct and indirect additional business opportunities for the country, as a whole. These, one feels, have derived, in large measure, from something of a psychological shift that have spawned the advent of entrepreneurial pursuits, some of which are not even remotely connected to the oil and gas sector. Others are connected only insofar as it caters, in large measure, to travelers from abroad with a vested interest in the country’s oil and gas sector and the spinoffs that derive therefrom as well as to visitors to the ‘one-time’ Banana Republic which is now rated among the most prolific oil producers in the world.
If we are going to have to wait and see just where this all-embracing ‘business bug’ takes the country, some positive signs are already emerging. One of these is the marked surge of interest in various forms of business pursuits by young Guyanese, ‘flat foot hustlers’, university students and others who are already employed in the formal sectors but who are driven largely by the there-is-money-to-be-made-here instinct. While there has always been a thriving micro and small business sector in Guyana this had been, for the most part, the forte of the so-called tradesmen and vendors whose business pursuits stood out on account of the uncomplicated nature of their business models. If many of these still survive, even continue to prosper, what the advent of the oil and gas industry would appear to have done is to spawn a new small business entrepreneurial ‘class,’ young adults, already salaried persons and university students who began to see an enhanced value in what has become known in Guyana as ‘side hustles.’ Indeed, interviews undertaken by the Stabroek Business as part of the Small Business Week exercise staged by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) revealed that significant numbers of university students and other young persons employed with various state and non-state institutions are, as well, part of the small business sector. Equally significant is the fact that many of them continue to ‘grow’ their businesses from what had, just a few years ago, been ‘flat foot hustles” to enterprises that have, incrementally, embraced the orthodoxies of conventional businesses.
All of this, arguably, goes back to the sense of opportunity that derived from the May 2015 announcement by ExxonMobil that Guyana had realized its first major oil find. That had the effect of lifting beaten down spirits and envisaging ‘opportunities’ in circumstances where, hitherto, sorry few appeared to exist. Those derived, in large measure, from potential foreign/local (Local Content) partnerships arising out of the various foreign entrepreneurial pursuits that the country’s oil and gas find had opened up. There was that period when the foot traffic in the lobbies of the Marriott and the Pegasus, particularly, ‘advertised’ unmistakable signals of deals in the making between some of the familiar faces in the country’s mainstream business sector, on the one hand, and travelers from assorted destinations who had journeyed here to seek (as we say in Guyana) ‘a piece of the (oil and gas) action.’ Various other kinds of peripheral business pursuits arose out of the expansion of some of the smaller traditional sectors and from the local and international market opportunities that derived from the enhanced local and international profile that attended the country’s oil bonanza. But that was only part of the emerging story. Micro and small business, too, had ferretted around and found their own lesser ‘hustles’ that reposed in other entrepreneurial opportunities that had arrived on the oil and gas ‘train.’ Setting aside the medium scale openings that were beginning to emerge in sectors like construction and transportation, among others, business opportunities extended into areas like cuisine, fashion and the creative sectors, those opportunities deriving primarily from the wider ‘curiosity’ about Guyana that came with the country’s ‘world class’ oil find.
This was the period of the earliest wave of fortune-seekers and the comings and goings of some of the ‘big names’ in the oil and gas industry. If the advent of an ‘oil and gas sector’ saw some of the major players in the local business sector shift their attention, almost entirely to the fortune-changing opportunities that reposed in ‘getting in on oil and gas,’ the ‘opportunistic’ inclinations of the small and micro business sectors also created a new dynamic in the Guyana economy. This new dynamic manifested itself in various ways. First, existing micro and small businesses sought to extend their market reach by investing in the ‘stepping up’ of the image of their operations and expanding the range of their ‘Guyana products’ to take advantage of the new oil and gas driven external interest in things Guyanese. Secondly, the micro and small businesses (the hustlers as they had come to be known) moved to ‘step up’ the production of things Guyanese –clothing, craft, and cuisine being among the best examples – to cater for visitors whose curiosity extended beyond their substantive business investment interests. Thirdly, oil and gas appeared to have triggered a proliferation of accelerated entrepreneurial interest among younger Guyanese, a circumstance that served to expand the frontiers of some of the country’s traditional small business ‘economic sectors,’ including agro processed foods, craft, cosmetics and craft, among others.
These openings were also marked by other interesting developments including a surge of (seemingly mostly women-led) investments in micro and small business pursuits in the aforementioned areas as well as the growth of what one might call the two-job tendency, where young , aspiring businessmen and women divided their time between either a salaried job and some kind of entrepreneurial pursuit or else, between structured money-making ‘hustles’ and attendance at institutions of learning including the technical institutions and the University of Guyana. We are going to have to wait and see, of course, whether, down the road we are going to produce a ‘generation’ of Guyanese whose combined academic bona fides and entrepreneurial skills will provide a new breed of businessmen and women. While the economic impact of oil and gas on the economy of the country, as a whole, still remains to be felt, the changing nature of the entrepreneurial landscape is already apparent. The Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, appears to have turned its attention more aggressively to burnishing the quality of the service that it could provide to the small and micro businesses that seems to have cultivated a passionate desire to ‘go places,’ never mind the fact that the corresponding response of the state has never really kept pace with the level of enthusiasm of the newly created ‘entrepreneurial class.’ What was evident was that the entrepreneurial spirit that had come to the surface, along with what was being extracted from Guyana’s territorial waters by ExxonMobil, may well have had the effect of ‘force-feeding’ a state sector that had simply not been suitably prepared for such a lavish ‘feast’ of business opportunities.
Whatever the authorities may say, evidence that the official/formal structures that are in place to cause the emergence of a robust micro and small businesses sector continues to be embarrassingly inadequate, is beyond question. To the contrary, state-regulated procedures in this regard continue to serve, in large measure, to create bottlenecks to ‘going forward.’ What continues to energize the micro and small business sector are, in large measure, the attention-getting openings that continue to be created by initiatives like the current Small Business Week undertaking by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry. (GCCI) But that is not enough. If the Chamber is to be commended for creating opportunities through which the micro and small business sectors can become increasingly drawn into the entrepreneurial limelight then it is for government to itself invest heavily in this pursuit given the role it is positioned to play in positively changing the shape of the business sector whilst opening up avenues through which poverty alleviation can be tackled head-on. It has to do so against the background of generous doses of enlightenment, pragmatism and the refinement of its understanding of the transformational role which a far more ‘liberated’ small business culture can play in contributing to the broader growth opportunities that repose in the wider oil and gas opportunity.
