After almost two years of collaboration with the United States Department of State and the US Embassy in Guyana, the Guyana Chapter of the Women Entrepre-neurs Network Caribbean (WEN Caribbean) is now ready to implement and manage local projects designed to build entrepreneurial capacity among local women.
Local businesswomen Lucia Desir-John and Barbara Dublin-Peterkin, who have been spearheading the creation of WEN Guyana, told Stabroek Business that the organisation will be working with women, some of whom may already be involved in modest business initiatives.
Desir-John said that Guyana has now fulfilled its obligation to create the local chapter of WEN Caribbean which will support female entrepreneurial ventures with support from the Washington-based project headquarters.
Desir-John, along with Dublin-Peterkin participated in the 2011 Caribbean Women Entrepreneurship Forum in Washington DC, which has the backing of both US President Barack Obama and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She told Stabroek Business that the focus of a planned WEN Guyana outreach programme would be to help equip modest local women-led businesses “to build on what they already have.” Desir-John said “ensuring that we can improve what already exists is going to be part of our focus.”
Desir-John disclosed that WEN Guyana had already completed a strategic plan and an operational budget and was currently awaiting the disbursement of funds from Washington to commence “serious work” in the area of training. She said that WEN Guyana’s immediate priorities include the identification of premises for the creation of a WEN Guyana Secretariat and a training facility and identifying trainers in the skills which the organisation seeks to impart. Desir-John says that WEN Guyana has already been reaching out to women and women’s groups who can benefit from what it seeks to offer and anticipates that it will be “accelerating and broadening” its outreach programme once WEN Guyana becomes more active on the ground.
Much of the preparatory work that has brought WEN Guyana to a state of readiness has been completed by a modest steering committee that included Desir-John and Dublin-Peterkin and which the two founder members told Stabroek Business was supported by the US Embassy in Georgetown. They explained that WEN Caribbean was seeking to build on the success of the Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Americas (WEAmericas) initiative launched at the Summit of the Americas in April 2012. WEAmericas leverages public-private partnerships to increase women’s economic participation in Latin America and the Caribbean with a view to reducing barriers women often face in starting and growing small and medium enterprises. These barriers, they explained, typically include access to training and networks, to markets, and to finance.
Desir-John told Stabroek Business that, training apart, WEN Guyana will be seeking to work with other committed local agencies to strengthen the voice, visibility and viability of women-led businesses in Guyana through advocacy, networking, and identifying and sharing best practices and resources in support of entrepreneurship development.
Desir-John restated a view expressed at the launch of the project that WEN Guyana served as “a tribute to the success of the ongoing relationship between Guyana and the United States of America and to the interest which the United States continues to demonstrate in the development of Guyana.”
