…Govt urged to liberate Guyanese of “digital constipation”
Guyanese entrepreneurs will soon have the opportunity to access financing as a Guyana-born businessman and telecommunications expert, Mike Singh on Saturday launched a US$100 million venture capital fund at the 2018 Digital Wealth Creation Summit.
Singh, who was one of the featured speakers at the event held at the Marriott, which saw the attendance of hundreds of persons, said that many brilliant ideas died because very often borrowers did not have the collateral to access loans.
While declaring that sometimes banks “kill entrepreneurship”, Singh, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Telkom Caribe Group, a telecommunications company based in Miami, Florida, announced the setting up of this fund to the applause of a receptive audience of mostly young people.
Singh, whose business has offices in Abu Dhabi and South Africa, was critical of Government’s efforts to promote and capitalise on the use of modern digital technology. He shared with the audience how surprised and shocked he was that almost the entire hinterland region was without Internet.
The Indigenous people of Guyana account for 12 per cent of the total population, and they should demand from Government that they too are connected, he said. “If I were them, I would have hold whoever is in power and say that ‘don’t fix the net, we’re not voting for you’. They are Guyanese too and they are being left behind,” he told a cheering audience on Saturday.
Speaking of his experience of working and travelling to different countries around the world, Singh said even Afghanistan in the midst of war had Internet service, but the Kaieteur National Park had “literally no Internet there”.
The businessman and philanthropist said for the coastal region, the bandwidth was also poor and stated that it must be improved in order for Guyana to reap the full benefits of digital wealth. “What we need is fibre. We don’t need 50 megawatts, we need one gigabyte,” he asserted.
Singh continued, “Because you cannot fuel innovation and wealth creation in the country in the Internet age unless you have bandwidth. Bandwidth helps to fuel intellectual capital growth and innovation. Your competition is not here in Guyana, but some man from India, or Shanghai.”
While declaring that many jobs would be replaced with technology in the near future, Singh said before Guyana could begin to create Internet wealth and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, “we need to solve the bandwidth quagmire and liberate the people of this country from the digital constipation they are forced to live with”.
Intellectual capital
Another important topic Singh touched on was the need to safeguard intellectual capital of locals. The businessman is of the strong opinion that the laws in relation to this are sadly inadequate. He has advised that policy decision makers have more discussions around this with the aim of trying to set a stage for this to take effect in Guyana. This area, he claimed, has the potential to create massive wealth.
