Coil: Talking business near a crime scene

by Vidyaratha Kissoon

The taxi driver put on the car light and said ‘Not cutting yall, but yall does do computers?”

The taxi driver had picked up outside of We Own Space . The driver overheard our conversation about things like the Myers Briggs Personality Types.

The taxi driver said he had talked to a girl who had seen outside WeOwnSpace. He had a conversation about seeds and the girl told him where to go and check on the internet about seeds and how seeds grow. He was keen to learn more about computers.

A week ago, young journalist Rehana Ahamad was robbed a few feet away from We Own Space. She was leaving her own work place SafeTV.

She reported that the robbers seemed to be about her own age (21).

One evening about two months ago, I had walked from Rehana Ahamad’s work place while waiting to do a TV programme , along David Rose Street. The place was darkish , and it would have been about the same time of evening that the robbers attacked Rehana Ahamad. I was a bit nervous as I am walking on any lonely dark road.

I discovered WeOwnSpace in the mini-mall at the corner of David Rose Street and Aubrey Barker Road. The doors are easy to miss.

According to the WeOwnSpace website , the place is “a unique hybrid co-working-training-social model tuned to Guyana’s socio-economic landscape for focused social impact”

I didn’t understand what this meant.

I had recognised a face and thought to look in. That evening, WeOwnSpace was preparing for their launch. I got a sense that the founders wanted to create a physical space which could nurture entrepreneurship . The space is meant to encourage meetings, networking, working, learning and other good things. Time could be rented and I could see myself coming for the AC.

I also sensed that there was an openness to the uncertainty of possibilities. There was enough flexibility for the space to evolve depending on the needs of the people who accessed it. The first time I visited, I was engaged in useful work related discussions which were unexpected.

I left, the excitement tempered by the nervousness of going back down the dark road to the TV station.

On Friday 23 September, 2016 , WeOwnSpace hosted a meetup. The presenters Rhea Benn and Shefali Seecharran had participated in the Global Entrepeneurship Programme offered by the University of Massachusett’s Lowell Boston. WeOwnSpace is hosting a series of the presentations from the 7 participants over the last two years.

I am the reluctant owner of Vidyaratha Inc. and entrepreneurship is not my thing.

I was drawn to the event by the title of one of the presentations “”ProstaGlove: improving realiable prostate measurement” .

I am the owner of an ageing prostate which I am told has to be measured at least once a year to check for risk of prostate cancer. I turned up to the event for the 5pm start, and found that I was the oldest person there. I hoped to stay for an hour or two and then leave.

The presentation though was not so much about the prostate. The presenters focused on the process of moving from the idea or product to the market. They used a particular methodology which included interesting tools like Business Model Canvas .

I had a fanciful moment – what if some young bandits passed by and saw an opportunity? Trying to imagine if they would welcome the invitation to stay. There was an interesting energy in the room though, which held me.

The gender dynamics – two young women presenting, one young man who I thought was being a lil too dominant though probably more about his personality rather than his gender, and black people, coolie people and others engaging in random conversations in a place not far from where other young people preferred to rob another young woman.

I was caught up again in an intense side discussion, outside the space, about a project I am involved in. The conversation burst my bubble of hope and optimism about Guyanese and their abilities to learn skills for survival. It was an important conversation, completely random, which I would never have had otherwise.

At about 845pm or so I was still there. I was fascinated when a young man jumped up to randomly take a marker and draw a diagram on the white board which was then disputed by others and I had to laugh when I realised that I didn’t not really want to leave when circumstances dictated that I did.

And I came out and looked on the road to see if there were any robbers lurking there.

Entrepreneurship was on my mind as a couple of stories in the week before showed Guyana’s bizarre contradictions when it comes to business and development. There was news that the Government was going to pay $500 million dollars to a Surinamese company for fruit juices for the school feeding programme.

If the Government has $500 million dollars to spend on fruit juices, shouldn’t there be some some schemes , at local levels to involve the parents of the school children in providing nutritional beverages?

Is this the nature of Globalisation now, that Government’s seem to have lost any interest in stimulating local economies with their own expenditure and that Government expenditure to relieve some of the effects of poverty cannot be spent on the poor?

Is the Region 9 peanut butter/cassava bread contract under threat now?

There was another story about the Minister of Business talking about how one of the Government clients would be importing stone rather than using form local quarries. The Government is powerless it seems in stating where contractors could purchase labour and materials for the contract.

Is how we get suh?

In another story, 17 year old Mark Hillman was ‘sentenced’ to the USAID SKYE training. He was engaging in what is now legal in the USA , Jamaica and other countries – selling marijuana.

There are going to be many young people whose daily survival does not give space for time to contemplate business canvas models or who have safety nets if their enterprises fail while they wait on success.

Cannabis apparently has generated exciting start ups in the USA, there is a lot of money available according to ones Forbes article. But, the cannabis industry though seems to favour white entrepreneurs and excludes black people – so even if Cannabis is legalized, poor youth are probably going to still going be excluded from the business.

Has Guyana created an enabling and level playing field for all prospective entrepreneurs in any field?

I realised in the conversation at WeOwnSpace though, that these issues were not coming up. Maybe they are not relevant to real entrepreneurship. The alcohol entrepreneurs see opportunities in the dysfunctional society , the lack of regulation and the nurturing culture.

Bleaching cream is big business.. legitimate business.

There was a discussion about a campaign for Guyanese consumers actively buying their own products, but cynics were looking at the Juice contract and the stone issue and wonder if the Government itself is not doing that, how do ordinary citizens do that? And whether or not a true entrepreneur would recognise that instead of making/buying from local , better to just import?

The taxi driver said “I see a lot of young people going in deh, is a good ting”

We Own Space is a good thing, not far from where a bad thing happened. It would be a good thing as there is news about expanding prisons , to also think of working on these kind of places where people can meet and talk and work towards some implementation of ideas and make money.

The powers that be might not be interested in these spaces. The users might realise that they could have massive, positive social impact when they have to transform the way they deal with the pervading injustices so that their ideas can bloom