A few things should be said, bluntly, about the now concluded Small Business Week. The first is that (as we say in Guyana) the noise in the market is not the sale. Of course, we must roundly congratulate the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) on its initiative as well as express our appreciation to GTT for the contribution which it made to the initiative. Still, given the need for even more to be done to enhance the growth and development of the small business sector, we have a duty to ensure that a measure of continuity is added to what has been accomplished by Small Business Week. Certainly, there is a need for government to position itself to come to learn about the outcomes of the week of events and engagements and to make corresponding contributions to an initiative which, one assumes, is designed to further strengthen the country’s economy and to incrementally alleviate poverty. In an economic environment that is in the throes of rapid transformation, it would be to our considerable credit if we are able to ensure that the small business sector benefits as well.
Small Business Week reflects the GCCI’s recognition of the critical importance of a small business community to the well-being of Guyanese even in circumstances where, at the level of the state, the preoccupation, unsurprisingly, is with those pursuits that have to do with the realization of an oil-driven economy. Accordingly, we are going to have to wait and see whether the recently concluded Small Business Week series of events has yielded the kinds of outcomes that we might have anticipated given the enhanced business profile which the country now enjoys. Now that Guyana has drawn attention to itself as a haven for investment, given the host of entrepreneurial opportunities which, from all accounts, derive from its status as, currently, one of the leading oil producers in the world, there exists every opportunity for a major expansion in the medium, small and micro business sectors and it is now for government to sink resources into whatever openings the recent engagement between the Chamber and the small business community would have accomplished in order to enhance the quality of the sector as a whole.
Two of the more significant takeaways from the Small Business Week were first, the seeming further entrenchment of young, ‘business-minded’ Guyanese, mostly women, as part of a growing small business community. What is noteworthy, here, is that our contemporary generation of young entrepreneurs are sinking their creative skills into modest small business ventures which are not only opening up income streams that add to substantive ‘nine to five’ jobs but that, in a great many instances, reflects, through the goods and services that they bring to the table, talents that are there to be further refined and rendered even more marketable, going forward. Here it has to be said that one can only hope that government would have been ‘taking notes’ about the needs of the micro and small business sector, one of which is access to more training in the orthodoxies of entrepreneurship that are critical to growing their businesses. Local small businesses ought, as well, to anticipate access to generous funding from the state to consolidate their present entrepreneurial undertakings.
Contextually, as the Stabroek Business has been consistently pointing out, it is for government to sink resources into initiatives that can open up opportunities for business training at both formal and informal levels.
Here it is critical to note that the infrastructure associated with providing state resources for small business growth should, for expediency sake, cease to be entangled in the conventional state bureaucracy. This, over the years, has failed to take the sector forward. New institutions, specifically designed to expedite the disbursement of such support as small businesses need for their growth and development, should be placed in the hands of business-minded administrators and disbursed through fit-for-purpose institutions. Such institutions, unconstrained by the inherent cumbersomeness of Public Service-type institutions, have demonstrated a distinct reluctance to create bottlenecks and needlessly complicate procedures. These kinds of institutions can help add value to the pre-existing worth of the micro and small business sector.
If the GCCI/GTT-staged Small Business Week may not have set the country alight in terms of widespread public participation, it has, at least, laid down some markers that can be refined to help strengthen those sectors in the various regions of the country. One of the key difficulties of the small business support structures in Guyana is that they become progressively less effective the further away they are from the coast. One feels that that the GCCI would be the first to concede that the further away you move from the capital, the more profound the experience of a seriously weakened infrastructure to ‘speak for’ and support the isolated communities. The net effect of this is that the growth of small businesses in communities outside of the capital and its close-by communities depend entirely on the initiative taken by the small businesses. Many of those initiatives are bound to fail on account of an absence of robust institutional support. Much of the way forward relies on the setting up of state-supported institutions that are, at the same time, free of the customary inhibiting rules that slow down and often retards forward movement altogether.
There is still a long road to travel and as the Stabroek Business has repeatedly argued the infusion of state-controlled assets into the growth of the micro and small business sectors in Guyana must not be attended by the burden of bureaucratic ‘trimmings’ which (as has been repeatedly stated by this newspaper) only serves to clog the machinery that are designed for the growth of those sectors. On the Essequibo Coast, where the Stabroek Business ‘sat in’ in on a Small Business Week exchange between GCCI Chamber President, Kester Hutson, and other officers of the GCCI and businessmen and women from the community, one thing quickly became clear. Unless government is able to assign the various types of resources that are needed for small business growth in communities beyond Region Four, we are on a hiding to nowhere insofar as country-wide small business growth is concerned. Enough was derived from the GCCI/Essequibo business encounter to trigger critical discussions between government and the GCCI in the matter of better positioning the small business community in the various parts of the country to grow and prosper. We await those kinds of follow-up engagements.
