Chief Executive Officer of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) Dr. Lowell Porter is backing the potential of the agency to give a significant boost to the growth of a vibrant small business culture in Guyana, its challenges and limitations, up to this time notwithstanding.
In an exclusive interview with the Stabroek Business earlier this week Porter said that he believed that there were “limitations” to the Bureau’s “model” but that those limitations did not prevent the entity from making a mark on the small business sector.
Porter’s principal query appears to be the initial 2,200 job-creation target set for the SBB, a target which he said was “overly ambitious” and not in keeping with the objective realities of the programme. Porter, who assumed duty as the entity’s Chief Executive Officer in June 2017 told Stabroek Business that while he believed that the lending component for the scheme’s small business support programme was designed in apparent anticipation of a buy-in by all of the country’s commercial banks only the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI) and Republic Bank (Guyana) Ltd are actual participants in the lending programme up to this time. He said that while there had been discussions with Scotia Bank with regard to the financial institution’s likely participation, it was a question of securing clearance from the bank’s principals in Canada.
