Beneficiaries of funding under the state-run Micro and Small Enterprise Development (MSED) project aimed at assisting vulnerable groups to create alternative livelihoods are now unlikely to satisfy a key original target set out in the project’s conditionalities, Derrick Cummings, former chief executive officer of the Small Business Bureau, the agency responsible for managing the project has told Stabroek Business.
Lengthy delays in getting the project off the ground after former president Donald Ramotar had launched it with much aplomb at what is now the Arthur Chung Convention Centre in October 2013, now mean that beneficiaries will almost certainly be unable to meet the critical target of creating 2,200 jobs within the first two years.
Credited to former president Bharrat Jagdeo’s advocacy of a low-carbon approach to national development, the US$10 million project is being funded through the Guyana-Norway partnership, under the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF). The first phase which is currently benefiting from US$5 million is being implemented over a two-year period and was expected to create and sustain 2,200 jobs.
The announcement that the project is unlikely to meet its job-creation target will almost certainly come as no surprise to observers, given what is widely known to have been the lengthy delays in disbursing funds to beneficiaries arising, this newspaper understands, out of procedural issues some of which were associated with external procedures. While this newspaper had been constantly seeking to nudge the Bureau to expedite the disbursement of grants and to seek to persuade commercial banks to hasten the lending process, Cummings had defended the project pointing out that delays that arose were mostly the result of the nature of the project including the need to work with the Inter-American Development bank (IDB) and the commercial banks and by extension to work with the procedures of those institutions.
Cummings, who is currently Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Business, told Stabroek Business that while the failure to meet the target was a disappointment, the project had successfully executed valuable business-related training for beneficiaries and had been pressing ahead with the direct disbursement of grants as well as facilitating commercial bank loans to persons who qualify in the two categories.
According to Cummings, the project has so far disbursed grants totaling $36.9 million to 131 small entrepreneurs across the country and that a further 19 approved grants remained to be disbursed. Under the loan component of the project 20 beneficiaries have secured loans from commercial banks totaling $141.6 million and according to Cummings these were currently sustaining 74 jobs.
Part of the responsibility of the Small Business Bureau is to monitor the entrepreneurial growth of the individual ventures which are scattered across coastal Guyana and Cummings said that these monitoring visits were being undertaken by teams from the Ministry of Business which includes the Bureau.
The MSED project sought to provide a response to the age-old problem of limited small business access to conventional financing sources and the scarcity of business skills amongst entrepreneurial aspirants, impediments acknowledged by successive political administrations.
