Over the weekend, the Omni Auditorium at Broward College, Broward County, Florida will host one of the single largest creative contingents ever to travel from Guyana to the United States. It is a quest from which the participants hope to realise a measure of commercial success. The creative industries in Guyana comprise mostly persistent triers whose returns never seem to match the efforts that they make. This weekend is one of those rare opportunities for designers, manufacturers and craftspeople to cash in on a potentially far more lucrative market.
The bigger mission, some of the participants told Stabroek Business earlier this week, is to seek to have the Guyanese creative industries make structured and permanent inroads into a fiercely competitive market at a time when fresh waves of challenges are emerging particularly from Asia. The failure of our creative industries to compete effectively on the global market up until now has been a reflection of our failure to market the country effectively. “A lot of our underachievement has to do with the fact that internationally Guyana is not really known for its creative skills,” one of the participants in the weekend event told Stabroek Business.
The Guyana Trade, Tourism and Investment Expo 2014, the name given to the event, is being sponsored by Hazelle P Rogers, Florida State Represen-tative (District 95) and County Mayor Barbara Sharief. The event will also serve as an opportunity for the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) the state agency responsible for – among other things – promoting Guy-ana’s goods and services abroad and which, until now has been regarded as an underachiever, to demonstrate that it
