Public accountability and the Small Business Bureau

In last Friday’s issue the Stabroek Business published a lead story regarding some of the details of the training regime being provided by the Small Business Bureau (SBB) under the Micro and Small Enterprise Development (MSED) project launched by then president Donald Ramotar in October 2013. The story contained information on a range of issues but had to do chiefly with spending by the bureau on training in various parts of the country.

This newspaper has written quite a few pieces on the bureau, many of them inquiring into the status of the disbursement of grants which, as we understand it, are part of the foundation of the project’s plans to grow small businesses in Guyana. It has to be said that the bureau has not been particularly forthcoming in the dissemination of information on the progress being made in the matter of growing the businesses of its grant beneficiaries. Indeed, the information that we received and which served as a basis for last week’s story was made available to us only after we had met with officials of the agency and after it had been agreed that it was desirable that aspects of the work of the bureau be placed in the public domain.

The persistence of the Stabroek Business in its reportage on the Small Business Bureau and the MSED project derives from our belief that the project itself is critical to the strengthening of the small business sector in Guyana. Indeed, bearing in mind that the project has already been unable to create the 2,200 jobs that had been targeted for creation within a particular time frame, it would be useful for us to learn just how many jobs have been created up to this time and just what are the revised time frames and job-creation targets. As such, we do not believe that it ought to be left solely to the judgement of the bureau to determine whether the outcomes of its work are brought to public attention.

There are issues that need to be made public, like the qualitative returns on training that has cost the bureau in excess of $140 million since its inception, both in terms of the direct benefits to the participants in those training programmes and in terms of the impact which the training might have had on the respective business enterprises. Some issues have also arisen in relation to training costs and the assigning of training contracts and these are yet to be fully addressed with the bureau though one would