September 2015 Issue Business View Caribbean

16 September 2015 - Business View Caribbean The Jamaica Business Development Corporation Supporting jamaica’s entrepreneurs The population of Jamaica is just shy of three million people. According to Harold Davis, the Deputy CEO of the Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC), 300,000 of them would like to go into busi- ness for themselves. By any estimate, that is a signifi- cant number of budding entrepreneurs in a relatively small, and not very wealthy, country. But for those in- dividuals who do wind up tackling the daunting task of establishing themselves as the owner/operator of their own enterprise, a very large majority of them will be in the Micro, Small, and Medium-sized sector (MSME) of the economy. The mission of the JBDC is to provide a wide range of business and technical support services for that vi- tal part of Jamaican society, and to pursue develop- ment policies that foster sustainable modernization and growth of this productive sector of its economy. The JBDC helps MSMEs survive and prosper by provid- ing them with business advice, consultancy services,