Emerging women-led enterprises in the micro and small business sectors have told the Stabroek Business that state-provided and/or subsidized spaces where small businesses can trade their respective trades without having to worry about the prevailing cost of vending spaces is a high priority in a business environment in which start-ups and small businesses still seeking to ‘find their feet’ can significantly reduce the costs associated with plying their trade.
Concern among the seventeen women who participated in the Stabroek Business’ ‘telephone’ survey earlier this week were unanimous in the view that the high cost of trading spaces in the capital present a ‘major challenge’ to the emergence of women-led businesses in the city.
Noting that privately-owned Shopping Malls are ‘beyond the Reach’ of small women-led businesses the women are of the view that were government to invest in ‘spaces’ that are dedicated to those business owners being able to pay modest rates for trading spaces, this would be equivalent of subsidizing those businesses through means that are equivalent to loans or grants.
Many of the women, all of whom travel into the city from parts of Georgetown, East Coast and (a handful) from the East Bank must leave home early on every trading day in order to ensure that they secure ‘strategic’ trading spaces on pavements or in other spaces within proximity to the areas that are heavily populated by shoppers.
Asked about the challenges associated with trading on downtown pavements the interviewed women told the Stabroek that they are acutely aware of the the implications of the spaces which they occupy for encumbering foot traffic and for impeding the entrances to shops trading in the city. They said, however, it was a question of ‘taking chances’ since street trading had become (in some cases) the only means of making a living.
With the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) currently staging a Small Business Week one interviewee who also holds a full-time job expressed the view that as part of its initiative to support emerging businesses the Chamber could support a lobby for government to invest in spaces for small business trading. “If the government really wants to support small, women-led businesses, it could start by putting resources into erecting Mini Malls in parts of Georgetown where small businesses can be comfortable.
One of the interviewed women told the Stabroek Business that it was an irony that ‘foreigners’ could come to Guyana and set up trading spaces at ‘choice’ locations while many local small and micro businesses were consigned to pavements and other less than convivial spaces. “If this is really Small Business Week, she said.
Much of downtown Georgetown continues to be in a condition of disorder, that circumstance deriving from the fact that neither City Hall no0r Central Government has managed to bring a sense of order to the prevailing conditions.
The women with whom the Stabroek Business spoke were unanimous in their preparedness to occupy trading spaces at strategic locations in the capital for which, they say, they are prepared to pay. of circumstance arising primarily out of the fact that city vending has long been a haphazard phenomenon, City Hall having failed, over a number of years to bring a sense of order to the capital. As the ranks of both regular and irregular traders have swelled downtown Georgetown has become, arguably, the most frenetic and congested area of the City. Trading has become a thoroughly disorganized and haphazard pursuit with indications being that the authorities have simply stepped back from making any attempt to restore a sense of order to Georgetown.
