The Entrepreneurial Challenge
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
January 28, 2004
THE mushrooming of businesses across Guyana, amid complaints by the Government's critics that entrepreneurial interest in the country's economy is waning, points to the "battle for the mind" that continually wages in the marketplace of public opinion.
But as the saying goes, 'Action speaks louder than words.'
For one thing, just as governmental opponents were belaboring the claim that foreign investors weren't coming to Guyana, the United Nations Development Programme released its World Investment Report in 2003 in which Guyana places 17th in the world for direct foreign investments.
In fact, Guyana, moving up 41 places from the 58th place it occupied up to 1999, numbered among the 44 countries designated "frontrunners for foreign direct investments" in the UNDP report.
In a factoid it issued in conjunction with the UNDP report, GO-INVEST said Guyana accumulated US$44 million in foreign direct investments and another US$42 million in local investments last year, the foreign investors coming from countries such as France, Philippines, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, China, Canada, Holland, Israel, Brazil, Malaysia, Barbados and India.
For another thing, Guyana has also jumped a few rungs up the development ladder, transforming from a low-income country occupying below 100th place in human development status in 1995 into a middle-income nation ranking 92nd among the 175 countries listed for 2001 in the Medium Human Development section of the UNDP's 2003 Human Development Index!
All this is good news.
But for an increasingly sophisticated citizenry with ever-high expectations, Guyanese see themselves having a long way yet to go to reach the standard of living they crave.
Making or helping Guyana achieve that goal is the entrepreneurial challenge of our times. Fortunately, the business community doesn't see its tasks insurmountable.
Since its establishment in 1986, the Institute of Private Enterprise Development reports funding more than 34,000 businesses and provided managerial and technical training to thousands of entrepreneurs. In 2001 alone, IPED funded 4,784 entrepreneurs with loans totaling $720 million, helping to create and/or sustain 7,618 jobs and adding some $4.2 billion to the nation's economy.
One factor of the entrepreneurial success story that IPED chairman Yesu Persaud found gratifying was that "over 57 percent of these businesses are owned by women micro entrepreneurs, many of whom were unemployed but have now become self-sustaining members of society."
The challenge is for more people to get on the private enterprise boardwalk and for the business sector to churn out more, higher quality and a greater variety of goods and services.
There's a great deal of research and scholarship that helps us understand the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development and growth.
Even without the benefit of those studies, we know that business - the engine of growth - accounts for a very large percent of the revenues that Government depends on to manage the country.
The entrepreneurial challenge, therefore, is for existing entrepreneurs to take advantage of the country's conducive business environment and for potential investors to ignore the rhetoric of the disciples of apocalypse and get on board.