Bank Ready: The Business Support Desk Comes to Region Three

About this event

R3CCI is pleased to host the Private Sector Commission's Business Support Desk, supported by the Inter-American Development Bank. Start with a number from our own law. Guyana's Local Content Act 2021 reserves 90 per cent of catering for Guyanese firms. For engineering and machining it reserves 5 per cent. That is the lowest figure in the entire schedule of 40 categories, and it is where the high-value work sits. In July, a Colombian electrical engineering delegation came to Georgetown to explain how they closed exactly that gap. Their answer was twenty years of working as a cluster, which took their firms from suppliers to partners. Their cluster, Cluster Energía Eléctrica, was created in Medellín in November 2006 by the Cámara de Comercio de Medellín. It now supports a specialised school that has graduated 650 technicians in energy transmission networks. Note who created it. A chamber of commerce. A cluster is not a separate association firms go off and form. It is one of the chamber's own services. Around the same time a Brazilian delegation came up from Manaus with the Brazil-Guyana Chamber of Commerce, and sat with the World Trade Centre Georgetown. Both came organised. Both were received by a chamber. Region Three was not at either table. Now the part you are not saying out loud. You do not want to sit in a room with your competition. You know who else does what you do on the West Bank and the West Coast. You have kept your suppliers, your prices and your margins to yourself for years, because that is how you survived. So here is the harder question. Why do the fastest growing firms in the world sit closest to their rivals? Brazil ran this as national policy and the IDB measured it firm by firm. Businesses that took part grew employment 17 per cent more than those that stayed out, between 2004 and 2009. Exports rose too. And the part nobody puts on a flyer. In the early years the holdouts went backwards. The firms that joined pulled the skilled workers out of the same local pool. If you stayed out you did not hold level. You lost staff to the neighbour who turned up. On top of that, the Minister has already asked you to do this. Zulfikar Ally is urging Guyanese to form consortiums to access cluster loans ahead of the Guyana Development Bank launch. The financing is being designed for groups. Right now Region Three has no group. What the Business Support Desk does. It sits with you and builds the business plan, the projections and the financial statements a lender actually opens. It costs you nothing. For established businesses seeking five million Guyana dollars or more. What you leave with. A straight answer on whether your business is fundable now and what is missing if it is not. A direct line to the Desk with free follow-up. And the names of the others in your sector in this region. Whether you ever call them is your business. A cluster is not a partnership. It is not a merger. It is nobody looking at your books. Come sceptical. Ask what happens to your information. Ask what the IDB gets out of it. Ask why it is free. Just ask in the room instead of from home. Building Bridges. Advancing Business. Empowering Region Three. Further reading: "Guyana's Oil Law Reserves 90 Per Cent of the Catering for Local Firms. Engineering Is 5." by Theon Alleyne, La Caribeña News, 6 August 2026. https://www.lacaribenanews.com/business-cluster-guyana-local-content-engineering-exxonmobil-2026/