Minister of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Kerrie Symmonds on Tuesday issued a challenge to the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill to do more research to help policymakers in Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean better assist the micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) community.
Symmonds declared he welcomed critique from academics, adding that it was necessary for them to help point out what was not working and provide recommendations and solutions.
“It is through that cross-fertilization of ideas that I think that the best interest of the region and this country are served,” Symmonds told the launch of the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management (SCHSBM) Caribbean Micro Small and Medium Enterprise Development Centre.
He urged UWI to ensure that the centre provides an opportunity to “refashion the small business development centre model in Barbados”.
The SCHSBM Caribbean Micro Small and Medium Enterprise Development Centre brings together a range of services and programmes that UWI Cave Hill offers, all aimed at developing and supporting entrepreneurs and operators in the MSME sector in the Eastern Caribbean.
“I think this is a golden opportunity for us to seriously rethink what we have been doing with regard to the small business development centre model and look at how better we can leverage opportunities on behalf of those people who we serve,” said Symmonds.
“We are at a point where we must urgently resurrect commercial activity, not only in Barbados but across the Eastern Caribbean,” he added.
Acknowledging that the region was under severe stress from major economic decline due to a lack of the once vibrant tourism sector, Symmonds said to help MSME sector operators navigate the current challenges it had to be against a backdrop of knowledge and experience, research and evidence, and not mere feelings.
It is against this background that he suggested the UWI to form a partnership with Government in order to do the necessary research and capture the data that was necessary to build MSMEs.
He said: “I genuinely believe that it is necessary for policymakers across the Eastern Caribbean to walk now by sight and not only by faith, and we have to do this in a way that allows us to connect in a very direct manner with the cutting-edge research so that we are in a position to help those people who we are elected to serve to better navigate the slings, arrows and pitfalls of modern economic activity in the Caribbean.”
Symmonds said that in addition to a lack of adequate research, he believed the region’s MSME community has been underserved for years because of a failure by authorities to “borrow” best practices from other places.
The minister highlighted Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, a pioneer microfinance organisation and community bank founded in 1983 by Muhammad Yunis. He cited Grameen Bank as an example that could “easily be copied and tweaked” to fit the Caribbean circumstances for MSME financing.
“That is why I said we need desperately to have that broad range of research data being captured and fed to us sitting at policy level, and with the greatest respect and wishes in the world that capacity does not exist outside of the University of the West Indies, with regard to those people who toil day and night on behalf MSMEs,” Symmonds declared.
