LAST FRIDAY, the three winners of the final cohort of the Women’s Empowerment Project (WEP) were announced. These women, who came out on top in the Business Plan competition will, in a few weeks’ time, receive grants of $26,000 compliments the Embassy of Taiwan in St Vincent and the Grenadines. This is in addition to grants of $9,300 they and 28 other female entrepreneurs in this cohort received earlier this year to help develop their businesses.

Sixty-two other women received similar sums of money in two earlier cohorts of the project.

Our heartiest congratulations go out to the participants in this project as well as to the Centre for Enterprise Development (CED) and the Embassy of Taiwan in St Vincent and the Grenadines who coordinated and sponsored the project respectively.

These grants, properly utilized, will have a transformative effect on the participating businesses, many of which could not satisfy the lending criteria of local financial institutions and thus were unable to grow. Of equal or greater value to the entrepreneurs were the technical assistance and weeks of training in business management and sector specific skills they received.

The grants through the WEP follow closely on the PRYME grants received by hundreds of Vincentians from the Government over the past two years with the same objective of giving small and micro enterprises an injection of funds to facilitate private sector growth, employment and wealth generation.

The recipients of these grants are but a few of the many small businesses that have emerged in St Vincent and the Grenadines over the last ten years or so. They signal the emergence of a new economy and represent a small shift away from the top down ‘plantation model’ where wealth is concentrated in a few hands, with the large work force having only basic skills and very little chance of upward mobility.

The entrepreneurs of today are not as averse to risk as were their parents and are more likely to have several income streams, unlike their parents and grandparents who spent all their working lives eking out an existence with a single employer.

Opportunities like those presented under the WEP and PRYME do not come every day and their benefits can be squandered if the beneficiaries are not intentional in the way they move forward. New business owners should not be shy about reaching out to agencies like the CED for help to get their financial management, product development, customer service, marketing and advertising right, so that when that big opportunity arrives at their doorstep, they would be in a position to say ‘Come right in’.

There is also a need for a local ecosystem that nurtures and supports diverse economic activity. Financial institutions have got to play their part and adapt to the needs of the new businessperson; government must remove unnecessary bureaucratic processes – at the customs department, the Commercial and Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and at the Inland Revenue Department for example.

Suppliers of goods and services must embrace digital transactions, and so too must consumers. Our entrepreneurs must place meeting and exceeding customer expectations at the centre of their operations, being consistent with their product or service, and embrace the value of collaborations and networking.