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.