If it would be churlish not to acknowledge the limited exposure afforded small businesses in the agro-processing, food processing, art and craft and other sub-sectors that fall under the umbrella of what are loosely termed micro and small businesses, it would also be misleading to provide a sort of one-swallow-makes-a-summer assessment to the one-off Duty Free Shop staged at the Umana Yana to coincide with the high-profile 2022 International Energy Conference and Expo now winding down at the Marriott Hotel.
These one-off public displays have now become commonplace, never mind the fact that there is usually, without fail, no reliable monitoring mechanism to determine the success or otherwise of such events, measured not so much in terms of the number of the attendees at the conference who may have taken the time off to take a patronizing peek at the display, but in terms of inquiries that might have been made of the product producers (or at least some of them) that may serve as pointers in the direction of opening up opportunities for these battle-hardened but still, in many if not most cases, unfulfilled small and micro entrepreneurs.
What would certainly be welcome is if we can be assured that the high level of oil and gas-related attention that the country is receiving can create an overspill (no pun intended) into the various other ‘lesser’ sectors which will certainly be required to deliver if development is to be an across-the-board phenomenon.
This assurance can only come from a far more determined effort on the part of the authorities, particularly those institutions that are specifically charged with nurturing the growth of micro and small businesses in particular, sectors which continue to be burdened with peppercorn budgets with which to execute their mandates.
Here, the effort to help these micro and small businesses raise their game has to go beyond the limited support that comes from state agencies like the Small Business Bureau and the Guyana Marketing Corporation. These entities continue to be manifestly underequipped to provide anywhere near the level and types of support which our micro and small businesses need at this time. Real growth, real advancement, can only come through the creation of an enabling environment which will mean significantly more investment in financing the development of agriculture, particularly farmers, agro processors, craftspeople and the various other disciplines that fall into the category of micro and small businesses.
Truth be told, and however much we seek to deny it, these sub-sectors have been, for the most part, going nowhere fast for several years and there has been no comprehensive attempt to pay a greater measure of attention to the fault lines.
The fact of enhanced liquidity linked to the greater availability of oil money creates an opening for us to begin to go down a different road insofar as these enterprises in the micro and small business sectors are concerned. Too often, however, initiatives undertaken by government in pursuit of the enhancement of these sectors usually take the form of throwing limited amounts of money in unplanned, fuzzy initiatives which, for the most part, fall at the first hurdle.
What events like the current product display at the Umana Yana do is to provide a snapshot of the potential of a sector which, in terms of enhancing the fortunes of investors, has not, up until now, tasted real success.
If there is nothing wrong with affording our agro processors and our craftspeople the opportunity of exposure on an international stage, it doesn’t really amount to much if, when the oil and gas forum is done and the lights are turned out our intrepid exhibitors are offered no option beyond packing up and going home.
