Staged with much aplomb at the prestigious Marriott Hotel as a joint public/private sector initiative in collaboration with the Caribbean Export Development Agency, the September 19-22 Guyana Trade and Investment Exhibition (GuyTIE) was envisaged as a Business to Business forum, “a platform for local export-ready businesses to engage foreign buyers and other potential partners.”
Specifically, its objectives, according to the organizers, were to “promote packaged investment opportunities” for foreign direct investment and local investment; to prepare and promote export-ready firms for export markets and to highlight Guyana as a destination for business. The event, the organizers added, would target participants ranging from large multinational firms to SMEs in both the goods and services sector, throwing them together with overseas buyers and investors from select target markets in the region as well as in the United States, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
With Guyana still deficient in the capabilities associated with the planning and execution of events of this nature there was, arguably, never the expectation that GuyTIE would accomplish all of its goals, though, perhaps, observers were prepared to accept an initiative that could boast the kinds of outcomes that would make a persuasive case for a follow-up effort in 2019.
