Hopefully, now that Guyana’s now firmly petro-focused economy is affording entrepreneurial space beyond the much narrower options that had obtained up until a handful of years ago, Guyana can begin to put behind it, the age-old cliché about women occupying the lowest rung on the entrepreneurial ladder, largely still wedded to a micro-business culture which, unquestionably, their ambitions have now outgrown.
A modest indication of an official response to that reality is reflected in the Women Empowerment – Leading, Innovating, Flourishing Together (We Lift) initiative, run by the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security, currently in its fourth year and designed to infuse a greater measure of gender equality into the opportunities that exist in the country’s economy.
One should make no mistake about it. Historically, the chatter at the levels of both the state and private sectors about women in the entrepreneurial sphere has not been supported by anywhere near sufficient action to decidedly lift Guyanese women off the proverbial entrepreneurial ‘floor’. With a handful of exceptions, women have largely skirted the edges of what we in Guyana quite loosely refer to as business with retail vending, manual agro-processing, and craft, being among those disciplines in which they have realised a generous measure of breakthrough.