In more ways than one the advent of an ‘oil and gas-driven economy’ in Guyana has had an overall impactful effect on the country’s business culture as a whole, creating a sense that the overarching preoccupation with seizing the entrepreneurial opportunities which the oil and gas sector has opened up, simultaneously, creates space for the emergence and growth of an expanded small business sector. External oil and gas-related investor interest in Guyana has served as a driver for the enhancement of demand for goods and services that spans the broad range of demands of the ‘reinvented’ developmental focus. While the larger ‘business players’ in the Guyana economy have focused in entering into partnerships with foreign investors who have a direct interest in providing goods and services directly connected to the requirements of the oil and gas industry, there has been, over just under a decade, a growing realization that entrepreneurial opportunities also lie in areas of business that are not directly connected to the oil and gas sector.
The process of creating the broader infrastructure that will serve as enablers to the substantive oil and gas industry necessitates the provision of goods and services in areas that include construction, transportation, hospitality, recreation and administrative services. Both long-stay and short-term visitors to Guyana, seeking to become more familiar with the socio-cultural profile of the country as a whole, creates small business openings in areas such as transportation, travel services, tourism, entertainment and short-stay accommodation, among others. Visitor arrivals also created opportunities for the promotion of local art, craft and fashion. All of these were employment-generating opportunities that served to expand existing businesses in those sectors as well as to create new ones. Women, particularly, have seized opportunities that have opened up for them to make a mark on the country’s small business tapestry.
What has been lacking, among the vast army of newcomers to entrepreneurship, is the orthodox ‘business savvy’ associated with effective product promotion and marketing. Fast learners though we are, there is no substitute for the application of customer appeal necessary to take advantage of a potentially lucrative market. Creating a more structured small business sector without burdening it with the bureaucratic baggage that attends the modus operandi has been the biggest challenge to the growth of the small business sector in Guyana. Financing and training are two of the requisites which government needs to make its responsibility. In the area of financing, it is not so much the absence of material resources as the lack of effective mechanisms to make small business borrowing procedural easy that is the problem. As the Stabroek Business has said previously, official approaches to providing support for the small business sector continues to be encrusted in thick layers of ‘procedure’ and bureaucracy which almost always fails to take account of the factor of expeditiousness associated with small business creation and growth.
If there is anything that political administrations in Guyana have been guilty of, it has been the woeful mishandling of services associated with small business growth, a circumstance that has arisen out of ignorance of established laid-down procedures, the application of numerous layers of bureaucracy and the infusion of ‘systems’ into the process widely believed to have been placed there to enable graft and corruption. Feedback from local small business owners with regard to their experiences with state-run entities suggest that the sense of urgency and ‘go-getting’ associated with the contemporary aspirant is decidedly at variance with the protracted procedure and bureaucracy that attends their modus operandi. If there is no escaping the important role that the state has to play in the growth of the small business sector in Guyana, experience has shown that that role should be limited to enacting legislation and providing resources for loans and grants to the sector. Our experience of state involvement in small business growth in recent years has pointed to, among other things, a lack of appreciation of the need for the entrepreneurial wheel to continue to turn with minimal encumbrance.
