– procurement programme nears completion

THE Ministry of Business is in the advance stages of preparation for the Small Business Procurement Programme which will see small businesses in Guyana receiving a fair chance of accessing Government procurement.

This is the most recent update from Minister of Business Dominic Gaskin who made the announcement on Thursday at the closing ceremony of the Micro and Small Enterprise Development (MSED) Project hosted at Herdmanston Lodge.

“This has been something that I have been pushing and trying to develop… a lot of work has already gone into it. I think that we are at an advance stage of developing the programme,” Gaskin said.

He said the programme, which began three years ago, has several components and is now at its final lap with 2019 being looked at as the proposed completion date.

The minister took the time to explain the components currently being addressed which are capacity building and technical training; data gathering; and procurement accessibility.
“One has to do with capacity building which is training small businesses for accessing procurement and understanding the procurement system and what the requirements are and what they would have to do to submit tenders or quotations etcetera.”

“The other also is technical training that will actually make them a little more proficient in what they do, whatever goods or services they provide,” Gaskin said.

Meanwhile, the next component deals with the measurement of the level of public procurement going to small businesses which the government is carefully working to develop.

“That is quite complex and that is probably the biggest sticking point right now. We have to have a system that will allow regular reporting so that every quarter we can say to the public this is the level of procurement in small businesses for that quarter.”

“So, that involves being able to identify small businesses whenever they procure whether it’s at the ministry level, whether it’s at the level of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board or whether it’s at the regional procurement level. We have to be able to pull that data together occupying the system to get that data collected in the first place,” Gaskin stated.

Following the acquisition of this information, the Business Ministry will need to develop measures which will provide small businesses with a better chance of tapping into government procurement.

“We have several methods identified such as a basic ‘set-aside’ where procurements below a certain threshold are only available to small businesses. Or, there are other ways we can do it where special incentive in the evaluating scoring system is given to small businesses or even to larger businesses that will sub-contract a portion of their work to small businesses. Even in the quotation system where ministries or entities ask for… any restricted tendering, they have to make sure that a fixed percentage of small businesses are included in the restrictive tendering or the quotation request,” Gaskin explained.
These are the areas the government is currently addressing even as the implementation phase is also to be decided upon from now to avoid any possibilities of future conflict.

“We’re working on some standard operating procedures so that when we propose this programme, we don’t have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how it’s going to be implemented,” he said.

Speaking to the Guyana Chronicle, too, was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Small Business Bureau (SBB), Dr. Lowell Porter. He advised that businesses seeking to be a part of the programme when implemented will have to be registered and must possess the necessary capacity.

The programme’s establishment is in keeping with the Small Business Act of 2004 under Section 11:1 which states that: “The Government shall use its best endeavours to ensure that at least 20 per cent of the procurement of goods and services required annually by the Government is obtained from small businesses and for this purpose, the Council shall prepare annually a Small Business Procurement Programme.”