Study finds major gaps in women-owned businesses in Guyana

– 4% participated in global supply chains

A recent study has found that while there is a large number of women-owned businesses in Guyana, there are many shortfalls when it comes to their operations, and, more so, many are not maximising their full capacity or unlocking their full potential.
This study forms part of the WE3A initiative that aims to provide women who own small- and medium-sized businesses in Central and South America with the tools and skills to develop their companies.
WE3A is being implemented by the Women’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank through the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
“Our focus is on three components: aspire, activate and accelerate, for which Thunderbird will create all the tools to help women entrepreneurs expand their businesses and facilitate access to value chains,” Senior Programme Manager at Thunderbird, Georgina Melendez, related.
“But the most important thing is that, through this project, we seek to break gender stereotypes and show women entrepreneurs as successful, so that not only women see entrepreneurship as a valuable economic function, but men entrepreneurs and the rest of the ecosystem also buy into them, and see what they are capable of achieving with the right tools.”
In addition to Guyana, the project seeks to aid women-led businesses in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador and Costa Rica; and, as such, has included comparisons to the state of women entrepreneurship in those countries in the study as well.
The study found that, at 91 per cent, Guyana has the largest number of formally registered women-owned businesses, compared to the other five countries. However, there is still huge scope for improvement.
In 2021, 95 per cent of these businesses had fewer than 10 full-time employees, and 82 per cent earned less than US$50,000 per year. However, only 4 per cent of the Guyanese women-led businesses are certified, and more importantly, 4 per cent participated in global supply chains. In these regards, Guyana fared worse than the other countries analysed.
This is largely due to three main pressing challenges that women-led businesses in Guyana face: access to capital funding for business projects, access to training and education on business management, and lack of business infrastructure for companies in the country.
The most pressing needs for these businesses to succeed are directly linked to the challenges they face, according to WE3A Project Manager Marta Blanco.
For Guyana, financial products and services designed for women-led businesses were the most significant need. This was also ranked among the top needs for the other countries analysed.
“So, this is why we’ve been buying into the roundtables and reaching out to financial institutions, [as] they need to create products that are designed to [help] women-owned businesses,” Blanco said.
“The women at the top that are well established have, for example, a house or a warehouse or property that they can use to access credit (at) the normal banking system,” Blanco explained. “But the ones in the middle have no credit; and those are the ones that need the push-up, but they need money to do it.”
The other two major needs for these businesses in Guyana are capacity-building and training designed for women-led businesses, and accelerators and incubators.
President of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Rowena Elliot, has said that once the capacity part is settled and the owners know how to run a business and how to get involved, the next step is to encourage them to expand.
“Some of [it is] costly as it relates to getting certification; but as it relates locally, getting your products with that “Made in Guyana” stamp, that can be done through us connecting with the agencies locally to encourage [them]. And we are finding a lot of women going through that process, and they are actually more inclined to want to get those different certifications, because it gives them more opportunities,” Elliot said.
“The idea of getting into entrepreneurship for women is a bit new to manoeuvre, but we’re getting there,” she added.
Only recently, over 200 female-owned businesses participated in the ‘We Lift 3’ expo at the MovieTowne Parking Lot. This annual event – the largest expo of its nature in the Caribbean – is directed towards promoting and empowering women entrepreneurs across the country.
This year, those women-led businesses that were showcased increased from the previous two editions by nearly 200 per cent.