Paucity of meaningful state support for women-led small businesses is a national shame
Our conversation earlier this week with some of the women who had participated in the display and marketing of goods and services at the recent UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium drove home, perhaps in a manner that had not occurred to us previously, the seriousness of what, for the most part, is a substantive gender lobby for the creation of an environment that is far more convivial to allowing modest, women-led businesses to grow and to prosper.
Some of the comments suggest that they see the contemporary entrepreneurial playing field as one in which concessions to women-led businesses have come in the form of compromises that are, primarily about window-dressing, pointing to the irrefutable and, frankly, shameful evidence that manifests itself within our Business Support Organizations (BSOs) of an unchanging culture of male domination at every level.
The point should be made immediately that the near unanimous view within the group of women with which we spoke is that the prevailing official preoccupation with the myriad issues that have to do with the ‘oil and gas economy’ and the preoccupation by the ‘mainstream private sector’ with the rich pickings promised by Local Content opportunities (some of these are actually in the process of being delivered) have meant that what is left in terms of attention to the concerns of small, mostly women-led enterprises is little more than excursions into patronage. This, at a level that allows for growth (if and when it occurs) at no more than a sedate, subsistence pace. This, of course, has been doing no more than reinforcing the ‘them and us’ business culture that characterises what we loosely describe as the private sector.
The women are brooding even as they persist. One moment they will engage you in an animated conversation about some new initiative which they see as their proverbial ‘turnaround thing’, and the next they will embark on a tirade about the frustrations of having to engage a Small Business Bureau that is illequipped to provide the level of support necessary to correspond with their entrepreneurial ambitions. It is hard to forget the remark made by one of the more assertive contributors to the discourse to the effect that the Bureau appears to serve, exclusively, the purpose of ensuring that “small businesses” remain small by running an operation that resembles “a saline drip”, being administered in doses designed to do no more than keeping them alive in a condition of permanent subsistence.
The agro-processors in the gathering - five of them, made the point about the frustrating gap between the seemingly endless surfeit of promises by government to provide facilities that will reduce both the cost and the ‘hassle’ associated with fairly effecting ‘manufacturing’ processes that often require limited and easily accessible technology but which raise serious affordability issues for the vast army of women agro-processors whose financial circumstances confine them to makeshift, labourintensive efforts in less than well-appointed spaces that brings them around to thinking that the returns are simply not worth the drudgery.
These women, we found, have become cynical toward a state bureaucracy that continually throws up full-of-themselves bureaucrats who consider their first obligation to be to create a thoroughly inflated sense of their own importance and afterwards, to articulate the labyrinthine procedures associated with clearing the hurdles to bringing you closer to whatever it is that might be necessary to take the process forward.
What also arose during the discourse, interestingly, was the eternal why can’t we see the President question, an inquiry that underscores the deep sense of cynicism among people with urgent needs, who find themselves having to engage petty state-salaried bureaucrats schooled in the proclivity of talking a lot but really saying little.
Accordingly, among the women with whom we spoke, there exists an overwhelming desire to ‘go to the top’, to see the real decision-makers, convinced that they simply must get past the bureaucrats if positive results are to be realised.
Our group, incidentally, included not a few women agro-processors and craftswomen who appear to have come to regard the prevailing official preoccupation with the country’s oil & gas pursuit as something altogether detached from the growth of their own ‘lesser’ economic pursuits. Accordingly they believe (some of them, at least) that the prevailing petro-preoccupation has served to dilute their own lobby for greater official attention to the emergencies associated with their own growth and in some instances with the survival of their entrepreneurial ambitions.
Changing that perception will require a great deal more than the kind of condescending patronage which they believe has been their lot over time.