The 130-year-old Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) is pursuing plans for both the upgrading of its physical facilities and the enhancement of its service delivery capabilities to coincide with what Chamber President Nicholas Boyer has told Stabroek News is a major push to respond to the needs arising out of the economic direction in which Guyana is moving and the needs that derive therefrom.
This newspaper has seen a skeletal outline of a Strategy Plan authored by Boyer which envisages the Chamber’s ‘major goals’ for 2019/2020 including the erection of new premises and broadening its membership base across the board. Earlier this week Boyer had told Stabroek Business in an interview (a report on which appears in this issue of the Stabroek Business) that the planned initiatives should be seen in the context of the wider initiative by the Chamber to help ready the business community for the advent of an oil and gas sector.
The initiative to reposition the GCCI as a Business Support Organization comes more than a century after the merger of what was then known as the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and the Royal Agricultural Commercial Society.
Among the various other initiatives documented in the skeletal plan for refocussing the Chamber is the creation of a small and medium (SME) incubator as well as SME programmes and also what the document describes as the creation of “new and meaningful partnerships” including memoranda of understanding, twinnings and inward trade initiatives.
The Chamber’s capacity-building initiatives will include the recruitment suitable for responding to the challenges which lie ahead as executives, committee heads and councillors, equipped to conceptualise plans for the future of the Chamber and support the execution of those plans.
The Chamber says it is in the process of seeking clearance to begin the construction of its new Secretariat.
