It has been two months since around 60 beneficiaries received grants totalling some $20 million under the Micro and Small Enterprises (MSE) Development and Building Alternative Livelihoods for Vulnerable Groups’ project. The cheques were handed over by President Donald Ramotar at a high-profile ceremony held at the Liliendaal Conference Centre late in January.
A much earlier event had been held at the same venue to herald the launch of the project which is being funded by monies secured from a fund garnered through environmental commitments which the Government of Guyana had made.
The significance of those commitments aside, what is important about this project is that after several decades of discourse about the need to garner funds to properly finance small business development, the government had finally been able to secure amounts totalling US$10 million for the development of small businesses.
It should be stated that there has been much ill-explained delay in the execution of this project, so much so that the two-year time span for the realization of some of its critical targets, not least, the creation of a specific number of jobs cannot, in all likelihood, now be met.
While the Small Business Bureau had done its best to proffer various bureaucratic reasons for the delay in rolling out the project it had always been suspected that the real reasons really had to do with what one might call political timing. Now that there has been some disbursement of funds, this presumably allows the beneficiaries to get on with the business of rolling out their respective projects.
There is now real and urgent work for the Bureau to do in terms of monitoring the roll out and ensuring that the job-creation element of the project is realized within a time frame that is as close as possible to that which was envisaged in the first place.
Monitoring the full and effective implementation of dozens of these small business projects across the country, particularly for the purposes of accountability and effective implementation is likely to be a demanding task and one cannot be blamed for wondering whether the Bureau has that capacity. We know too that the IDB has been assigned an oversight role here so that one might assume that that might help in ensuring the smooth implementation of the project.
Still, given the fact that it is not uncommon for some projects of this nature to ride off quietly into the sunset without a trace it would be comforting if some meaningful mechanism were to be put in place to ensure that we are kept abreast of the pace of its progress.
This newspaper has sought to do so and has been trying to get the Bureau to say something meaningful about the project from time to time in order to provide the public with assurances that it is still alive and active.
Nor have we been reluctant to comment publicly on those interludes during which the Bureau has been quiet.
We believe that a point has now been reached where the Bureau has to become much more proactive, first, in working with the Council to accelerate the process of grant disbursement to persons who qualify, second, in monitoring the progress of the small business projects that are already on stream and third, in providing regular (perhaps bi-monthly) public briefings on how the project is proceeding.
We believe that there may well be considerable potential for this project to serve as a catalyst for significantly boosting the local small business sector, though, by the same token, there is every likelihood that in the absence of proper accountability and effective monitoring, it too, might disappear quietly and without a trace.
