2009-12-11
MORE COLLABORATIVE APPROACH NEEDED FOR REGIONAL SUCCESS
Minister of Industry, Investment & Commerce Karl Samuda has cautioned CARICOM countries against looking inward as a community, emphasizing that if there’s a chance for regional success, countries must adopt a broad-based, participatory, cohesive and collaborative approach.
“It cannot be that one country individually does well, but the rest of the region suffers because they have not caught up, and there’s no mechanism in place to ensure that the success achieved by one (CARICOM) member state is passed on to the other member states” the Minister asserted as he addressed the opening session of a CARICOM and Latin American Forum on “Access to Credit and Financing for SMEs” yesterday.
Against this background the Minister has called on the CARICOM Secretariat to establish a monitoring mechanism that will hold each member country accountable to report on infrastructural development within the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector, particularly as it relates to accessing resources available to the region.
Minister Samuda called for the sharing of technology, research, strategies and systems to help build small businesses, noting that the SME sector creates valuable jobs that will enhance the competitiveness of the various industry players. “It is incumbent on us as a region to monitor developments within each country in order to lend support where there’s weakness in terms of established infrastructural requirements,” he argued.
Minister Samuda urged Regional countries to “act expeditiously and get up to speed” in laying a “solid foundation for financing the basic infrastructure that will drive the micro and small business sector.” “It should never be that resources that are available are delayed – we have no more time to waste” he emphasized.
The one-day Regional forum, held at the Jamaica Pegasus in Kingston, brought together more than 150 small business representatives from Trinidad, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Bahamas, Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, St. Maarten and the USA, to discuss and make recommendations on a range of SME matters including: “Institutional Support for SMEs”; the Competitiveness of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises;’ and “Policy Challenges of Financing Micro and Small Businesses.”