Can we produce more entrepreneurs?

Countries the world over face the problem of providing jobs for young people. The public sector cannot do it all by itself. Great reliance has to be placed on the private sector, hence the current emphasis on entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur is simply one who undertakes or does things.{{more}} More to the point, he or she is one who sets up a business. It is not necessary to be a graduate or even be educated to be an entrepreneur. Education, however, in addition to its other manifold benefits, contributes to the emergence of entrepreneurs. Top research universities like Stanford, at the cutting edge of technology with their silicon valleys and science parks, are major sources of innovation and entrepreneurs.

Some have argued that entrepreneurs are born not made. I do not waste time on this sort of argument but simply note it is probably a bit of both. Evidently, some situations predispose people to become entrepreneurs. One such is growing up in a business environment. The Boyeas, Coombses, and Liverpools, all from the Georgetown area, are classic examples. Similarly, persons with a technical skill, acquired formally or informally, often become entrepreneurs. In SVG, auto-mechanics and food processers are good examples of this. I shall return to this subject later. More controversially, groups which trust each other, people from the East as opposed to Negroes, are said to produce more entrepreneurs. This is why I am proud to be associated with ‘SEARCHLIGHT’. Here is one group of black people who have pooled their meagre resources, purchased a property and a printing press and have gone into business.

Entrepreneurs usually surface when a market develops, and they are people ready and able to seize their chance. For many years, we have been importing used vehicles. Several persons obviously realized they would need to be serviced and went into the business. As a result, we now have mechanic shops scattered all over the place. In the days of Milton Cato, of blessed memory, great emphasis was put on food processing and the Agrolab was set up. One lady received extensive on- the- job training there and was sent abroad by the Labour Government for further training. She has since set up her own business. There have been many imitators. Entrepreneurship does not require original thinking; a lot of it is based on imitation. At a more sophisticated level, computers started being used in a big way in SVG, and sure enough at least two Vincentians have set up successful businesses to import and service them.

It is clear then that we do have people with the gumption to go into business once the market is there. In fact, I feel the biggest constraint on the emergence of entrepreneurs in SVG is the small size of the domestic market. This conviction was strengthened after I read ‘Country Driving’, rated as one of the best books published last year. The book is about China and is correctly subtitled ‘A Journey through China from Farm to Factory’. That huge country with 2,000,000,000 people is at the opposite end of the spectrum from SVG with a mere 100,000. The author tells how in China there are entire towns devoted to producing a single item, as for example: buttons, playing cards, umbrellas, pens, neckties and socks. He describes how the Chinese routinely bulldoze mountains to make industrial estates where flat land is not available. In SVG, some think we should not be doing so for the Argyle airport. But what fascinated me most is the author’s description of two entrepreneurs who with a self -taught engineer set up a 21,000 sq. foot, three- storey factory in three months. The factory was to produce millions of a tiny ring, a small component, to be used in making brassieres. In SVG we do not have a market to support a factory making a whole brassiere. How can a would- be entrepreneur spot an opportunity in a non- existent market?

One way to produce more entrepreneurs then is to have a bigger domestic market which would offer greater opportunities. This is precisely what the Treaty of Basseterre seeks to do. It is shortsighted to say the St Lucians should not come here to buy shares in our banks and supermarkets. Inter-country investments by the private sector played a big part in getting the EU going. What we should be doing is looking to see what we can do in other islands. Fortunately, some people are already doing so. If we are not to build the airport nor pursue regional integration, how then do we propose to develop miniscule SVG?

In the old days, the way we got around the serious constraint posed by an almost negligible domestic market was by having preferential access to metropolitan markets. This enabled our farmers to become banana entrepreneurs. With the end of colonialism and the rise of the EU, those opportunities are no more. We have to grow our domestic market by joining with other islands. The other option is to go on the world market. As far as this option is concerned, we are unlikely to ever be any big manufacturing nation, but as with the medical school and the archaeology digs there should be some niches out there for us. SVG INVEST should help us find them. I hope its new chairperson rises to the challenge.