The probe that the Stabroek Business has been conducting these past several weeks in order to determine how small and micro-businesses have been faring in the restrictive environment of COVID-19 has been, in more ways than one, revealing.
Frankly, some of those that we have engaged have not been doing well. There is a limit to what these brave but always fragile enterprises can take. To stay alive they depend heavily on day-to-day turnover. They were simply not built to survive a sudden loss of market extending over more than three months. For some of them there may be no way back. This is not some apocalyptic editorial scenario. Some of the owners of these hapless businesses have told us so – bluntly.
Unfortunately, what they have also told us is that both government and the private sector could have done more to consolidate their resilience long before COVID-19 came along and squashed their dreams. One of the things that many people do not understand about many small and micro-businesses is that they are ‘pride projects,’ created by their owners not just to make a living but to persuade themselves of their essential value, as individuals and as members of a society. Often, when those projects fail they see it as an erosion of their own worth.
Part of the ‘take’ of those who may have lost their businesses is that both government and the private sector Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) have let them down. It is not a political point but their own, we believe, candid historical look at the failure of the state and the private sector bodies, over a protracted period, to do enough to ensure the survival and growth of the ventures into which they had put everything.
One of them, a female agro-processor from the coast (who, incidentally, has still not given up on the recovery of her business) told us about the failure, over many years, to translate discourses on the creation of an industrial park that allows emerging businesses in sectors like agro-processing and the creative sectors to have access to production facilities. If that had been the case, she argues, those small businesses which, today, face the threat of extinction, might have been better positioned to survive COVID-19. We have, on more than one occasion, made the argument for such a facility.
Another observation, from an East Coast agro-processing couple had to do with the country’s abysmal failure to successfully market Guyana brands in regional and international markets. This, too, has been the subject of editorial comment by the Stabroek Business. The ‘few and far between’ external promotional events mostly fall short of their stated goals that derive from limitations in planning and execution. At the levels of both government and the private sector, Guyana has been a consistent underperformer in terms of global marketing of what one might call a Guyana Brand. That, quite simply, is the plain, unvarnished truth.
There is, as well, the matter of us having failed to carefully think through, far less implement, a workable blueprint for what we now term as economic diplomacy – a concept that appears to have been underpinned by a generous measure of misconception. Setting that aside, the various state agencies (GUYMIDA, GOINVEST et al) created over the years to handle, among other things, aspects of the regional and global product promotion have underperformed too, mostly because these entities remain, to a large extent, harnessed by a state bureaucracy that does not allow them free rein. Had that not been the case they might probably have been able, by now, to match the accomplishments of Jamaica’s JAMPRO in terms of what it has been able to accomplish extra-regionally with Jamaican brands. Our approach to marketing our goods and services externally has been characterized mostly by bluster and bureaucracy.
The state-run Small Business Bureau (SBB) remains the only highly visible state institution that provides geographic across-the-board support for small business growth. If there is much merit in both its conceptual and operational approaches, the fact of the matter is that the gap between the resources at its disposal and the magnitude of its mandate puts it at risk of continually underperforming.
Nor have there been any really impactful sustained interventions on the part of the BSO’s (perhaps the relatively recent efforts of the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association might be seen as an exception) to help take our small and micro-enterprises forward. Whereas it is reasonable to assume that the substantive role of the BSOs is to work to take the business sector (as a whole) forward, nothing can be clearer than the fact that the Private Sector Commission is, in large measure, concerned overwhelmingly with ‘big business’ issues, its occasional excursions into a kind of ‘reaching down’ patronage, notwithstanding.
With hindsight, the condition in which many of our micro and small-enterprises find themselves is a function of an age-old failure on the part of both the state and the BSO’s to recognise that the private sector is a holistic entity and that growth has to take place across the length and breadth of its sub-sectors. Here, it is clear that the treatment afforded small and micro-businesses is a function of the (lowly) place that it has been allocated in the pecking order. Their creation in many instances having been a function of their owners’ focus on finding an income-earning option, they are, in many instances not perceived as orthodox businesses but as hastily assembled ‘hustles’ which, at any given moment, could become victims of what one might call the ‘house-of-cards syndrome’. That prejudice has likely impacted the manner in which they have been treated by the ‘mainstream’ private sector.
If it is true that many of our small and micro-enterprises have emerged in a haste and out of need and if many of their owners possess little more than an uncanny talent for making something out of nothing, that does not mean that they cannot metamorphose into bona fide businesses down the road, given the requisite guidance and support. It has happened in other countries. More than that, there is no sustainable evidence to suggest that small and micro-enterprises are not serious about scrupulously honouring their obligations to their creditors. While banks’ concerns about shareholder interests must be factored into their lending policies, these must be balanced against a circumstance in which they are uniquely positioned to help grow the small business sector in Guyana, consolidating their own business interests in the process.
Many of the things that inhibit the effectiveness of the state agencies to contribute to small business growth are, in many instances, infuriatingly procedural and bureaucratic in nature – like the counterproductive nature of time-consuming procedures and the cumbersomeness of rules that have a wearing-down effect – and what we have found in the process is that the mindset of small and micro business owners whose pursuits are, more often than not, races against time and circumstances, is that they are, by disposition, disposed to the frustrations that frequently attend ponderous procedures.
Both the state and the private sector bodies have, by their actions, or lack thereof, dampened the spirit of enterprise which we believe reposes in the disposition of the small and micro business sector. Nothing short of a serious re-evaluation of the philosophy and the procedures that attend their respective attitudes to that sector (sub-sector) will bring about the desired change.
