Let’s empower small businesses

MANILA, Philippines —  Small business owners are the most fun people. There is a certain spirit that dwells in them, like an unlimited fountain of joy. Their ability to produce something out of nothing and daily interaction with the members of their enterprise seem to give them eternal inspiration.

This holds true even for those in the informal economy who are yet to surface their livelihood and to transform it into a real business entity — especially true among Filipino micro entrepreneurs and among other races in highly challenged economies. The irony is that it is in this segment of society where people smile more, and more intently.

The debate between big business proponents and inclusive growth advocates on the way to move society forward, taking into consideration fast-growing populations such as the Philippines, seems to be resolved more and more in favor of the latter over the long term.

The first strategy generates employment more quickly and provides prompt solutions to poverty up to the extent of how huge the business conglomerates in the area could grow. The second strategy, which basically entails the development and continuous functioning of small businesses, takes longer to positively impact the cash flows of concerned communities.

Mortality rate among enterprises with limited capital has been pretty high, and so, the population and economic size of small businesses across the country has been very fluid. One can almost describe this business segment as going through the cycle of birth, death, and resurrection all the time. But why is inclusive growth fueled by small enterprise development winning the debate?

Developing and growing society through small businesses makes all the sense in the world. We have heard of many stories of corporate people leaving their jobs and positions to create their own small enterprise. It is an innate gift among people groups, this burst of imagination and of energy to create something new, something beautiful and something that could be of use to the communities within our reach.

Throughout history, the world morphs in a cyclical manner into a global machine of economic and political systems not necessarily healthy for everyone. Actually, unjust for most. And in the end, unsustainable for those in power

given the friction created by the injustice that the greater majority has to suffer.

While wars between and within nations continue to persist in some parts of the world, the bigger population has managed to live in peace. Peace that is precious, for everyday is without the absence of difficulties and of the need for sacrifice.

Small business entrepreneurs carry the torch for humanity and all of us ought to support them, we in government and those of us in big business. Let us help them operate in a level playing field so that more of them can survive the hurdles of growth. They need to be able to hang on. How many excellent, outstanding ideas and products have been quenched without the bigger society knowing it, as hundreds of start-up enterprises die a quiet death?

A level playing field means that we treat small businesses with the same respect and we allow them adequate opportunity for success as we would give the more empowered segments of society. It is not a call to support the lethargic and the mendicant; it is not a call for doleout systems. It is a call for rewarding hardworking, competent small entrepreneurs with the opportunity to see their dreams and aspirations come true.

Let us pay them their just wage for services rendered to society by paying their products and services on time, by not making them pay unreasonably high interest rates, by allocating an adequate portion of subsidies for them

that will otherwise go to less efficient or less needy segments of the economy, by making our business processes (regulatory, licensing or financing) more accessible to them. In short, let us make life less difficult for them.

Let not the success stories of our country be limited to a number of small businesses making it big. Sometimes, it

could be unknowingly alienating. Let our success story be that a huge majority, substantial numbers of our small entrepreneurs successfully survive, gets established into a stable entity, and that great numbers of new enterprises are churned out by our economy from year to year.

Let the success story be the success story of our people as a country of creative and hardworking entrepreneurs who live a long life of growth.

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Ma. Luna Cacanando is the President and CEO of the Small Business Corporation (SB Corp.), the GOCC under the Department of Trade and Industry that offers a wide range of financial services, specifically for small and

medium enterprises engaged in manufacturing, processing, agribusiness (except crop level production) and services (except trading). -   Ma. Luna Cacanando