Entrepreneurship for lasting success

There was a time when the great Guyanese ambition was to get a government job, or later down the road to become a lawyer or doctor or to be sponsored for overseas residence – as Minister of Tourism, Industry and Commerce Susan Rodrigues said at the Guyana Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (GCCI) Youth Entrepreneurship Conference, held under the theme “Igniting Guyana’s Next Generation of Entrepreneurs”. She proposed that youths must now look with equal or even greater fervor at entrepreneurship as a profession
Our country has entered an extraordinary stage of development with the government deploying our oil revenues – which have transformed the fiscal capacity of the state – to create roads, hospitals, schools, housing, infrastructure and opportunities that were unimaginable only a decade ago. And that’s the key – the government is creating infrastructure that creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to satisfy needs in every area of national life. Unless this is recognized and grasped, there is an obvious danger in our new prosperity where Guyana could become wealthy without becoming sufficiently entrepreneurial thus creating a bubble that will inevitable crash and burn. That would be a catastrophic mistake.
As the experience of next door Trinidad should remind us, oil is a finite resource and because they did not focus enough on fostering entrepreneurship – which is not – they paid the price. The real test of our oil boom is therefore not simply how much the government can spend, but how effectively today’s oil revenues can help create a diversified economy capable of generating wealth long after the oil wells decline. And this is where the government’s support – through the Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce, with support from the Ministry of Education and GBTI – for the GCCI’s initiative to encourage entrepreneurship in youths to become producers, investors, innovators and employers – not simply applicants for government jobs, grants and contracts – is important.
The government is plunging ahead in its critical role of creating the ecosystem in which entrepreneurship can flourish: access to finance, technical training, digital infrastructure, reliable electricity, business incubation, mentorship, export assistance and a regulatory environment that does not bury a young entrepreneur in bureaucracy. But all Guyanese and especially youths must disabuse themselves of the notion that only the government can generate prosperity – that the government will be the entrepreneur for Guyanese.
The private sector must increasingly become the engine of employment and innovation to deliver wealth and the GCCI’s launching of the Youth Entrepreneurship Conference to encourage young Guyanese to see and grasp opportunities not merely in Georgetown but throughout the country -in agriculture, agro-processing, tourism, construction, technology, logistics, manufacturing, renewable energy and the emerging digital economy – is very responsible. In each of the above areas where the government has launched supporting infrastructure, such as the GtE initiative to supply cheaper electricity that is critical for manufacturing industries, entrepreneurial opportunities abound. Indeed, the oil industry itself should be viewed as a giant classroom where Guyanese youths should be learning how to supply the industry, provide specialized services, develop technology and acquire skills that can subsequently be exported to other oil-producing countries.
There is also, as Minister Rodrigies identified, a cultural challenge where for generations, we regarded a secure government job as the pinnacle of economic achievement and then later to enter the professions of law and medicine. That made sense in a poor economy where opportunities were scarce but our rapidly developing Guyana needs a different mentality – the entrepreneurial mentality. We need young people asking not only “Who will employ me?” but “What can I create that will employ ten other people?”
The GCCI’s initiative therefore deserves more than ceremonial support – it should become part of a much broader national project to make entrepreneurship a central pillar of Guyana’s development strategy. While oil can finance the transformation, only Guyanese enterprise can sustain it and as such by creating tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, Guyana will have converted a temporary resource windfall into a permanent increase in national capacity.
That would be the real meaning of “igniting” the next generation.