Small Business and Entrepreneurship Minister Kerrie Symmonds (right) spoke on the need of ensuring that Barbadian products were up to international standards to gain foreign exchange through exports while owner of Barbados Rum Cakes John Bayne looks on.
Small Business and Entrepreneurship Minister Kerrie Symmonds receives a hands on experience in mixing one of the products available at Golden Touch Spa by its owner Tiffanie Nurse.
Over the coming months, local small businesses are expected to benefit from a closer look into international best practices to help refine their goods and services to make them exportation-ready.
Minister of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Kerrie Symmonds said his ministry will be doing this in conjunction with the Barbados National Standards Institute (BNSI) in a bid to earn the country much needed foreign exchange.
“Over the next weeks and months, we will be working with them to go over the architecture of standards awareness in Barbados to help all of you small business operators to get a better feel for what are the requirements and best practices in the international community.”
“It makes no sense just hoping we can return to a pre-Covid environment, we must now be able to lift all of these , not only onto Barbadian counter tops in their homes and so on but also into Europe and across Caricom and into the United States and that is the only way we can compensate for the shortfall in foreign exchange,” he said.
The minister, accompanied by Permanent Secretary Esworth Reid, Small Businesses Association head Senator Lynette Holder, Acting Director of Commerce Bertram Johnson and several officials from the ministry and Fund Access, was touring several Barbados Trust Fund Limited small business clients yesterday.
He emphasised the role standards played in not only quality of product but also in labelling and packaging.
“BNSI is a critical support pillar for commerce in Barbados. You cannot do business seriously in today’s world unless you are able to demonstrate to people that you are making an effort to reach a certain standard. It is important that everything we do be done to a level of excellence which not only allows Barbadian customers, who can be very discerning when they are ready, but the international community to know what is the quality that we are doing and be able to place reliance on it...”
“So what I am targeting is the architecture across this whole economy where in every sector in every type of service or good we produce, we are now looking at what we do, thinking it and trying to do it to the highest level so that we are ready for the export to compensate for the shortfall in foreign exchange,” he outlined. (JMB)