Women-led businesses and the IDB’s ‘growing together’ gesture
The recent disclosure that the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) has launched a funded programme - Women Growing Together in the Americas which seeks to encourage women entrepreneurs in the hemisphere to integrate their businesses into foreign trade and regional value-chains, is deserving of region-wide acknowledgement. Here in the Caribbean, not least in Guyana, the customary ‘huff and puff’ about an entrepreneurial route to economic emancipation for women has not been, even remotely, adequately matched by practical action to realise that goal. Over time, the Stabroek Business has conducted a number of interviews with local womenowned micro and small businesses. A sizeable number of these have blamed a lack of any real institutional support from both government and Business Support Organisations (BSO) for their failure to place their businesses on a firm long-term footing.
We anticipate entirely the disapproving frown of our BSOs in response to our assertion that these, historically, have been gender-lopsided, the leadership balanced overwhelmingly in favour of men occupying mostly sinecure positions. We challenge them, however, to make anything even remotely resembling a persuasive case to the contrary.
This leads us to the point that both government and BSOs have been, seemingly, largely indifferent to women-run micro and small businesses. Indeed, it often seems that such support from the aforementioned parties accruing to small women-run businesses, of which there are possibly a few thousands across the country, have appeared to be mostly patronising and concerned mostly with the accumulation of what one might call ‘gender credentials’. Up until now - and the reason for this is not entirely clear - no women-led BSO’s in Guyana have been able to match the profile of the ‘big three’, despite the fact that quite a few have sprung up over the years. and here, there is a lack of clarity as to whether the interests of women-led BSO’s, such as these exist, coincide with those of women-run micro and small businesses in areas such as agro-processing, vending, and the snackette sectors where at least hundreds of women across the country make a living.
In the instance of the IDB’s recently promulgated Women Growing Together in the Americas, one notes that the Bank has been conducting the discourses on the project with the private sector in the hemisphere. Contextually, given the potential significance of the initiative and given the fact that here in Guyana there are few if any serious links between women-led micro and small businesses and the country’s Business Support Organizations, there ought to arise some measure of curiosity as to the role that the local private sector will play in the rolling out of the IDB’s programme.
One can already hear a sounding of voices from within the ranks of the BSOs challenging this assertion though the truth can easily be determined through resort to the hundreds (possibly more) of womenled micro and small businesses in sectors that include, farming, agro-processing, handicraft, the culinary sector, and the beauty industry, among others whose anguished survival-related ‘screams’ in the prevailing COVID-19 environment are yet to be meaningfully answered by our BSOs bearing survival-related recommendations.
We are told that the IDB’s programme will “provide technical assistance to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) led by women through Connect Americas for Women to foster inclusive post-pandemic economic reactivation, generate more and better employment, and reduce gender gaps.” All of this, of course, has a well-intentioned ‘ring’ to it though one might justifiably inquire as to whether the substantive private sector which entirely dominates the positions of authority within the BSOs are suitably oriented to play the lead role seemingly envisaged by the IDB in what could be a potentially life-saving initiative for many local women-run micro and small businesses. Or does the IDB’s enlightened intervention not take us to a point that raises questions as to whether there should be, sooner rather than later, a far more determined effort than has obtained previously, to create a broad-based national small business support organisation not just to help drive the IDB initiative, but also to begin to add much greater weight to the consolidation of small and micro women-led businesses in a more determined effort to help them reach their the goals to which they rightfully aspire.