Guyanese small businesses prevailing

MORE THAN 180 small businesses in Guyana received some $55M in grants last year,
according to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Small Business Bureau (SBB), Dr Lowel
Porter in an exclusive chat with www.aroundtheregions.com .
The SBB staff reflected on their own grinding hardships resulting from the global COVID-19
pandemic and wondered how their clients were holding up.
“At that time the staff said we have our clients let’s see how they are doing because if we are
suffering, they are suffering too. We developed an online survey overnight and we contacted
them. After reviewing the results of the survey, we found that there was a genuine need. We
went back to our Board of Directors and conveyed our thoughts. We did an eight-page proposal
and submitted it to the Board and with a few tweets we were able to roll out this programme
around April or May of last year and it’s still going on,” Dr Porter said.
“We believe that it was timely, it was important, and it was a great initiative,” the CEO reflected.
More than 10,000 firms have registered with the SBB and some 78 percent of them are still
operational. This figure places Guyana among the top countries where small businesses thrive.
“That is a number that is really unseen in the rest of the world and the reason for this is because a
lot of those persons I believe depend on that business for their livelihood, so they make the
effort,” CEO Porter said.
“From 2014 to 2018 we distributed almost 600 grants and almost 200 loans and the programme
ended in 2018 but from 2018 to 2020 even though 2020 was a bad year (because of the COVID-
19 pandemic), we have distributed more than that amount of grants because we started doing the
GAP analyses. We did an assessment, and we understood what was needed to fill those gaps.
However, do we toss them (small entrepreneurs) aside because of their illiteracy? No, we just

can’t because, while it’s sad that many of them can’t read and write, we are mandated to work
with them nevertheless,” he said.
The success of the SBB has goaded the CEO of the SBB to plan rolling out a project shortly
named “Promote our Own” to popularise the ‘Best Practices’ of the highly successful
Guyanese small business initiative, Dr Porter said.