Last Friday, with most of the business community’s attention turned in the direction of the Guyana International Petroleum Business Summit & Exhibition (GIPEX) at the Marriott Hotel, which was being closely monitored both locally and externally, a decidedly more modest gathering of local small businesses had defied the brisk early morning downpour to occupy tents along the westernmost block on Regent Street, displaying locally-made products including jams and jellies, cooking sauces, cosmetics, spices, wines, jewellery, clothing and footwear. The display tents were tightly packed along the parapets on both sides of the street, leaving an attractive gauntlet along which fair numbers of evidently pleased and in some instances clearly surprised persons strolled, viewing and making purchases.
This newspaper is yet to secure feedback from the organisers of the event, the Small Business Bureau, regarding how its first ever Street Market fared. If, however, the level of vendor participation and public comment was anything to go by, the event, it seemed, was a considerable success, the paucity of prior publicity notwithstanding.
In a sense, the Market Day offered a welcome public occasion for Guyanese (and visitors to the country) to gauge the progress being made by the state-run Small Business Bureau (SBB) in building a robust base among indigenous small-scale manufacturers. Invariably, events of this kind are only moderately successful, except in those instances when the displays are attended by generous doses of entertainment. The product promotion opportunity that the event afforded was also welcome, given the fact that the scarcity of shelf space in our established retail outlets for locally produced foods, food spices and cosmetics goods continues to be one of the biggest challenges confronting local small manufacturers.
What the Market Day demonstrated is that the producers of the range of goods that are part of a continually growing sector are gaining in both confidence and acumen. Their efforts are well worth the attention of the local as well as the international market, as well as what, up until now, has been the modest support of the financial sector.
The need to provide an expanded local market for the range of goods now being produced by increasingly diligent producers in the agro-produce and creative sectors will become even more evident as the unfolding of the oil & gas industry brings with it increasing external curiosity about Guyana and what it has to offer. That, up until now, is not an issue that appears to have attracted sufficient public or private sector consideration.
There can be no question than that the small businesses that paraded their goods on Regent Street last Friday, have, to varying degrees, ‘paid their dues’. The perceptible improvement in product quality as much as in labelling & packaging, points to an enhanced understanding of what the international market requires. Some of them, particularly those in in the food spices and cosmetics sectors have lifted their standards to the point where they now routinely and confidently display their goods at both local and international product displays and marketing events.
What, perhaps, was most striking about last Friday’s event was the opportunity it afforded to remind us of the surfeit of new, locally manufactured products that are appearing on the local market and the diligence of their small business producers. The limitations here repose in the small volumes arising out of the modest production capabilities and in high production and marketing costs.
Events like last Friday’s Market Day suggest, however, that the screw may be turning, albeit slowly. Apart from the strong indications that the producers are stepping up their production promotion game, discourse in the sector has drifted into areas like the acquisition of more advanced machinery and equipment in order to enhance both efficiency and manufacturing processes as well as higher standards of packaging and labelling in order to better position the products to meet the demands of the market.
But the challenges do not end there. While the contemporary evidence of improved product quality is present in the manufacturing processes across the sub-sectors that comprise what is commonly described as the small business sector, the institutional support, not least the financial backing necessary for investment in more efficient production processes and in marketing continue to be lacking. This is a point that can hardly be overemphasised.
Local small businesses seeking to access the expanded markets that can only be reached through participation in international trade fairs and consequential access to partnerships with overseas distributors that can enable wider distributorship cannot, all too frequently, afford the costs associated with participation in such events. Whilst the efforts of the Small Business Bureau to facilitate participation in such events are to be commended, the Bureau’s own limited budget is insufficient to match either the needs or the ambitions of the driven small business owners in what are considered the emerging areas of production like agro-processing, leatherwork, local jewellery, cosmetics and fashion.
Last Friday’s Market Day served not just to put on display the skills and innovativeness that repose in the aforementioned sectors, it served, as well, as a poignant reminder of what remains to be accomplished in these areas. The slow growth of what are considered the emerging sectors is likely to persist in the absence of significant stepped-upped financial investment therein. There is, as well, the need for a far more aggressive “buy local” push as well as increased initiatives to attract external markets. Both of these require the sustained support, not least the financial and technical backing of both the public and private sectors. Over time, such backing has been far from adequate.
The vendors with whom we spoke on Friday were mostly restrained in their comments on the Market Day and its outcomes. A significant percentage of sales at these types of events derives from patronage-related purchases rather than from strong consumer preference. Accordingly, the volumes of sales are invariably modest. Still, the product producers who participated in the event seemed to feel that the exposure was worth the while.
On expects that the Small Business Bureau would have taken away a great deal from last Friday’s experience. Under current Chief Executive Officer Dr. Lowell Porter, the Bureau has managed to iron out some of the ‘kinks’ that had attracted media and public attention including those that have had to do with the administration of grant allocations, anomalies in its training regime, and the extent to which the grants afforded its clients are being properly channelled. The targets that had originally been set for job-creation following the launch of the Bureau and which were decidedly fanciful in the first place, were never likely to be met. Beyond these considerations, searching and valid questions have arisen regarding the preparedness of local financial institutions to wholeheartedly back the focus of the Bureau.
There have also been indications that the Bureau has stepped up its due diligence, in ensuring that grants allocated to its clients are channelled in the agreed directions, a circumstance that had not always been the case previously. What was also notable was the pointed and deliberate efforts of the SBB’s current administration to raise the profiles of its clients by helping to finance the creation of infrastructure for business growth and to enable their participation in local and international product-promotion events.
There have, however, been hurtful hiccups along the way. The most notable of these, so far, has been the failure to roll out the promised setting aside of 20 per cent of state contracts for small businesses, which had been promised from January this year. That alone, given its significant employment-generating potential, would have been a significant boost for the small business sector. The primary reason for the non-implementation of this initiative so far appears to be the thicket of qualification criteria – NIS and GRA compliances as well as arriving at criteria, in the first place, for determining what constitutes a small business. The sloth in rolling out the 20 per cent ‘set-aside’ initiative, which, had it been up and running, may, by now, have provided lucrative contracts for many of the Bureau’s clients, has to be dealt with seriously if we are serious about small business growth.
The key challenge of creating an expanded linkage between our local producers and a wider domestic market (creating a lucrative external market requires an initiative of a different nature) is still nowhere near to being overcome. Conversations between the vendors and this newspaper on Friday last, as the Market Day was winding down, hardly left us any the wiser as to whether, from the standpoint of sales, the Market Day was worth the while. Evidently, and for all sorts of reasons, we are yet to arrive at a point where really significant material returns can be anticipated from such ventures. The connection between buyers and sellers which can only be created through skilful and sustained product promotion continues to be lacking. The reality is, as well, that some of the indigenous sectors that comprised last Friday’s Market Day are still largely underdeveloped, still lacking in either the material resources or the institutional support that can properly position them to meet expanded market requirements. What the Small Business Bureau’s Market Day effort last Friday demonstrated however, is that potentially, our indigenous, skills-based industries are resilient enough to survive and even grow alongside what are regarded as the far more lucrative pursuits like the emerging oil & gas industry.
