Community

Reaching Out to the Guyana Business Community

July 2019

Over the last two years, the Centre for Local Business Development (CLBD) has regularly hosted a series of seminars for the business community. They support the CLBD’s purpose to help local businesses strengthen their competitiveness and facilitate their preparation to join the oil and gas supply chain. One seminar gives an overview of the offshore oil and gas industry, another is on procurement for local suppliers, and the third is on safety, security, health and environment (SSHE). To date, the seminars have had more than 3,000 participants, with about 20 to 25 attendees at each.

Attendees of offshore oil and gas course at the Centre for Local Business Development, Georgetown

With the growing awareness of the seminars, the CLBD has been invited by many of the businesses in Georgetown to come educate their staff on these topics. And these outreach efforts have extended beyond Georgetown. CLBD staff recently travelled to the town of Lethem in the Upper Takutu-Upper Essequibo region (Region 9) to offer the three-hour offshore oil and gas seminar to the community there. The population in this remote part of the country is largely indigenous Amerindians, with tourism as a main industry. The seminar provided an introduction to the oil and gas industry to this community that will likely see a greater number of visitors as more people come to Guyana due to the country’s oil and gas developments.

As another step to making information available to even more Guyanese, the CLBD is developing an online version of the offshore oil and gas seminar.

Launching in the third quarter of 2019, the online offering will allow anyone in Guyana with internet access to take the seminar.

Introduction to oil and gas course in Lethem

Supporting SSHE Program Development

The CLBD has regularly hosted a seminar giving an overview of SSHE in the oil and gas industry. This training, made up of two three-hour-long modules, provides a broad overview of SSHE concepts and requirements for the industry. The goal is to give local businesses a sense of what they would need to have in place in order to supply to oil and gas companies, so they can make investment decisions.

Building upon these SSHE seminars, the CLBD will soon be offering an additional safety seminar. Targeting company management, it will review the SSHE system documentation required to be in place to meet the oil and gas industry’s international standards. The four-hour seminar will focus on how a company can build their own SSHE system. ExxonMobil and the prime contractors for the Guyana projects can then review these systems and advise if any additions need to be made. This program will allow local companies to build out their systems on their own, but with expert support available to them.

The new program will roll out in July. The Centre is targeting to have 200-300 companies take the seminar over the following six months. The program is open to companies regardless of whether they currently have a contract related to the Guyana portfolio or not. Participants will be able to develop their SSHE programs at their own pace, with those awarded prime and subcontracts expected to move through the program first. As there are 300-400 companies in Guyana that can supply various good and services relevant to the oil and gas industry—from security, transportation and waste management companies to those performing fabrication work—this program has the potential to significantly elevate SSHE performance throughout the local business community.