Ways to achieve the entrepreneurial spirit

Dec 04, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I will assume that we all are aware that historically acts undertaken during, immediately after both slavery and indentureship and throughout our colonial experience favored some races. History tells us for example, that while assistance was given to Portuguese and East Indians to establish businesses none was given to ex-slaves and their every effort in this direction was deliberately undermined – sabotaged.
There is rarely a young East Indian who does not have some relative/family friend who owns his/her own business. But really, whether the business is owned by parents, relatives or friends is not the point. The point is that early in their lives these youths have been near and seen people at work in their own business. Indian boys and girls have seen their parents or relative for example, struggling with a plot of land, reaping its fruits and selling same at the markets or in the neighborhood. Indeed mostly at week end or after school East Indian boys and girls actively participate in the business. They have in their own homes, experienced hard times, or seen friends of their families suffer loss and a fall in living standards for a period, when either the weather or insects deplete their crop. And they have experienced or seen families recover at the next time for reaping when conditions are favorable. It is such experiences that foster the entrepreneurial spirit, that spirit that allows one to continue even after failure. Unfortunately the opposite is true for black youths; few blacks have had a similar experience.
For Blacks who have not had this experience their likely behavior after one or two failed attempts at business is to give up, show an unwillingness to gut it out. The youth who does not know from experience that things will change. That misfortune and hard times are merely a temporary period in a business cycle, that this too will pass, will turn away from the business at the slightest loss. He/she will be afraid to face further loss and seek the safety of selling his/her labor for fixed wages. Sadly this is the black man in Guyana at this time.
Since East Indians and Blacks come to self-employment with different experiences it stands to reason that there would be a need for the adoption of different approaches for helping these groups’ efforts at self-employment. So, what can be done to help blacks, especially youths to regain the desire for self-employment that their ancestors had?
In my two articles published in the Stabroek News on April 23rd and letter of September 1st1992, I dealt fairly comprehensively, with the above issue and I would encourage readers to make an effort to read them. Now I will highlight one of the approaches mentioned in one of the articles and also provide some alternative approaches to helping especially black youths, turn to self-employment.
My position has been that experiences that demand people depend on their own creativity and efforts to get themselves out of uncomfortable situations provide adequate settings for one to learn self dependency. For example unto around 1980s an examination of the lives of successful businessmen in the USA would reveal they either came from families that were involved in business or in their youth were involved in organizations like the Scout Movement.
Scouting usually offers an experience that exposes one to fending for oneself, for beating the odds, scouts are taught never to give up, to fight back. I understand that in scouting to win certain badges one would be left in the forest with the barest of necessities. One has to find one’s way out using one’s ingenuity to make a fire, construct a bed and eat off the land. Scouts have to figure out how to cross creeks that separate them from their final destination and they have to do so without swimming across and having no boat provided. Thus a strong scout movement could go a long way in helping to establish that fighting spirit, which when applied to business I call the entrepreneurial spirit.
Burnham through National Service was (consciously or not) providing an environment for the establishing of the said spirit. Pioneers too sometimes experienced living in the jungle for a few days and finding ways for making comfortable beds, locating food etc, using what is in the jungle. Pioneers worked the cotton and black eye pea fields and tended life stock. They experienced hard times when for example there was a bad crop and lived comfortably when the fields yielded bountifully.
All of these are important lessons for those wanting to be entrepreneurs. Years ago I had an interest in locating persons who had been pioneers in the GNS. I found that a number of them were small business men and women. Even if this meant selling clothing on the side walk or beers and aerated drinks from old, discarded refrigerators – they were demonstrating that entrepreneurial spirit.
Another approach that offers encouragement is the establishing of a practical business course in our schools, beginning at the upper levels of the primary school. In many Caribbean islands there is the Junior Achievers program. This program is a mixture of theory and practice. Students decide on and make a product and sell same. During the course they are given different designations in their business aping what is in the real world. At a certain period in the course they are attached to established businesses and shadow those persons holding similar positions to theirs in the real world.
Claudius Prince

Editor’s note: This letter is lengthy and will be continued in a forthcoming issue

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