GMSA budget comment seeks more $$ for small business development
CLICK HERE TO READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Against the backdrop of what, over several years, has been a failure on the part of government to grant incentives and create opportunities for the meaningful expansion and growth of the micro- and small-business sector in Guyana, one of the country’s high-profile Business Support Organizations (BSOs) has issued a call for the government to ‘change gears,’ and to throw its weight more purposefully behind modest business ventures even as these continue to become manifestly worn down by the various pressures associated with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Saturday last, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) used its customary media assessment of the country’s annual budget to call for “an expansion of the grant component” on funding provided by the country’s Small Business Bureau (SBB) “to further improve small businesses’ capability and readiness for local content opportunities.”
In issuing the call for a more generous measure of grant financing from the SBB, the GMSA noted that much of the GMSA’s membership “is made up of small business owners especially in the agro-processing sector.”
Since its launch in 2013 the SBB has been unable to provide an adequate response to the growth ambitions of its members, particularly in the agro-processing sector, a circumstance that has drawn criticism from agro- processors who have made comments to the effect that the Bureau is not ideally structured to keep pace with the growth ambitions of micro and small businesses. Other critics of the modus operandi of the SBB blame what they say has been the fact that from its inception it has failed to secure the autonomy that is necessary for its effectiveness but rather, continues to be tied to the ‘apron strings’ of a government ministry, with all of the procedures and constraints that attend that relationship. What its being harnessed to a government ministry has also created over the years is its inheritance of a reluctance to place information in the public domain with regard to what is widely believed to be its considerable task to meet the job creation targets set back in 2013.