What transpired at last Sunday’s Guyana Marketing Corporation-staged UncappeD event may well have raised more searching questions about the likely long-term prospects for small and medium-sized businesses in the agricultural agro-processing and craft sub-sectors. The jury would still appear to be out on whether these sub-sectors are growing at a sufficiently steady pace and whether such sloth as attends the rate of growth may not be attributable to remediable challenges that are yet to be properly addressed.
To understand the real prospects for the entrepreneurial future of these emerging businesses, you have to divest yourself of the distracting and often counterproductive rhetoric and deal squarely with the realities. One of those is that these emerging sectors now stand at a critical crossroads, confronted as they are with challenges, one of which is an insufficient level of real institutional support.
Now singled out among the local Business Support Organisations (BSO’s) for the support it offers the small business sector as a whole, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) is now moving in the direction of establishing alliances that could well point to a breakthrough for the small businesses that showed up at Providence on Sunday.
