We met Kevin Murray and Carolyn Caesar-Murray at The Women Expo, a Sonia Noel Foundation for Creative Arts (SNFCA) event staged in collaboration with the Women’s Association for Sustained Development. The organisers say that its focus is to create spaces that allow for women investing in small business to help promote their enterprises. Staged on Saturday and Sunday last at the Pegasus Hotel, the event is currently in its fourth year.
Harmony Inn, the brand given to their two separate accommodation facilities at Parfaite Harmonie and Festival City and Secret Villa Apartments in the Stevedore Housing Scheme, comprise one of those many examples of emerging enterprises that give the lie to rumours circulating in some quarters that there is a dearth of ongoing private sector investment in Guyana. Their investment, they say, is emerging rather than thriving and their focus, they say, is on arriving at a juncture where the investment will secure an increased level of patronage in what has become a highly competitive accommodation sector.
The first facility was established in 2012 at Parfaite Harmonie, seemingly an unlikely location for such a facility but one which, they say, had been carefully researched. If the immediate-term patronage is not what they had hoped it might be, the couple are banking on the fact that Parfaite Harmonie is a growing community and that, ‘down the road,’ business could ‘pick up.’
