Over the years, there has been no shortage of state-initiated undertakings ostensibly designed to provide sustainable opportunities to enable Guyanese women, possessed of skills in various fields, to transform their talents into meaningful earnings, though it can hardly be said that these undertakings have had the effect of significantly transforming the lives of our womenfolk and families which, in a host of instances, they support as single parents. That said, critics of the outcomes of these undertakings have dismissed a great many of these initiatives as politically-driven undertakings designed to covet greater shares of the political gender space since few, if any, of these undertakings, have been proven to be sustainable.
Indeed, a perusal of the recent history of women’s entrepreneurship in Guyana will undoubtedly bear out the fact that women’s success in the vast majority of entrepreneurial spaces has been due to their own talents coupled with, not infrequently, investment undertakings that can only be described as leaps of faith. Here, one recalls the current relationship between government and women in undertakings like the latter’s participation in local and regional product display and marketing, which, throughout the years, have failed to yield meaningful entrepreneurial results for participants. Agro processing, for example, is one of those entrepreneurial ‘horses’ that have been ‘flogged’ continually over the years by government, though, here again, it is difficult to point to any significant surge of entrepreneurial breakthroughs arising out of these undertakings.
Nor can we boast of any meaningful entrepreneurs arising out of the Ministry of Agriculture’s boast earlier this year that “54 new Shop Corners” had been established last year, the point here being that with most of the state-driven announcements of this kind, the noise in the market does not even remotely measure up to the extent of the ‘sale.’ Contextually, the April 20-21 Ministry of Human Services-staged 4th ‘WE LIFT’ – ‘Women’s Entrepre-neurs: We lead, we innovate, we flourish together’ event staged on April 20th and 21st at the National Aquatic Centre, Liliendaal, provided a generous measure of talent, since a perusal of the creative displays bared the pleasing reality that many of our female souls of a decade and more ago, remain ‘in the game,’ though, from an entrepreneurial perspective there is no compelling evidence that they have, in terms of entrepreneurship, made the kind of headway that one might think they ought to have made over those years.
What the ‘WE LIFT’ event bared was the sustained profusion of talent that still persists among Guyanese women, never mind the fact that it would be a decidedly uplifting thing if the Ministry of Human Services would allow these women to ‘grace’ the lobbies of the Pegasus and the Marriott when the ‘high rollers’ from abroad are there to ‘hunt down’ investments arising out of the country’s oil and gas agenda. This is where, one feels, the functionaries from the Ministry of Human Services can perhaps serve as far more effective lobbyists for these women and their creations.
We are told that the ‘WE LIFT’ event featured approximately two hundred creative people and their products, and here one ventures to suggest that if there can be some sort of a limited-time sponsorship effort that places these women and their products at strategic locations where patronage is likely to be generous, this is likely to be a great deal more rewarding for them than one-off events that ‘crowd’ them into a single space thereby creating a condition of ‘selective attention’ to product displays from which fewer displayers are likely to benefit.
Here, by way of inquiry, one ventures to wonder whether it would not be altogether appropriate to seek to press ExxonMobil et al into service to ‘offer’ suitable spaces in which our creative people and their creations can dwell for ‘a few days’ (perhaps a week) bearing in mind that these spaces must be both sufficiently strategically convenient and convivial so as to enhance the likelihood of attention and patronage. Such undertakings should be undertaken as collaborative events between the oil companies and other private sector bodies (perhaps the GCCI may be the best pick here) as a means of ensuring that state involvement does not give rise to charges of prejudice.
What the presence of so many of our creative people at the recent ‘WE LIFT’ event suggests is that amidst the agenda of oil and gas conferences and high-sounding investment fora there is more than ample room for providing support for the strengthening of local entrepreneurship from the ‘bottom up.’
