TRANSPORTATION • WOMEN IN BUSINESS • GUYANA • 27 JUNE 2026
By LCN Newsroom | La Caribeña News
QUICK ANSWER Carlyne Stewart, CXO of Clarke’s Productions Inc., attended the WeLead Association Conference on 27 June 2026 to build cross-sector partnerships for Beyond the Wheels 2.0, a national transportation and safety forum set for October 2026 in Georgetown. |
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Carlyne Stewart arrived at the WeLead Association Conference 2026 on 27 June with a clear agenda. Not the one printed in the programme. Her own.
Stewart is the Managing Director and Chief Experience Officer of Clarke’s Productions Inc., and the lead organiser of Beyond the Wheels 2.0, a national transportation and safety forum set for the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Georgetown on 6 and 7 October 2026. The WeLead conference room was exactly the kind of environment where the partnerships a forum of this scale requires are built and confirmed.
For Stewart, the two events are not separate conversations. They are the same one.
What Beyond the Wheels 2.0 actually is
The picture of Beyond the Wheels 2.0 is now public. The forum is designed to bring together insurers, logistics operators, fleet managers, public-sector officials, driver trainers, and road-safety researchers around a common table, in a country whose road conditions and culture have become an economic issue the private sector can no longer treat as somebody else’s problem.
The evidence for that is not hard to find. On 26 June 2026, the day before WeLead, Ignite News reported that the Private Sector Commission had publicly called out Guyana’s poor road culture as costing the country billions of dollars. The PSC’s intervention the day before a national women’s leadership conference where a transportation forum organiser was actively networking was not a coincidence in timing. It was confirmation that the agenda Stewart has been building toward is now the same agenda the private sector is speaking aloud.
La Caribeña News has previously reported on the data gap at the heart of Caribbean road safety, drawing on a conversation with Lacey Williams of CARITRANS, who spoke ahead of the forum. Williams’ argument is pointed: the Caribbean has spent decades borrowing risk models from elsewhere and applying them without local data to validate them. Beyond the Wheels 2.0 is, in part, an attempt to change that for Guyana.
“Road accidents are multi-dimensional, multivariable phenomena, which require careful analysis.” — Lacey Williams, CARITRANS
Stewart’s role at the WCCIG
Stewart’s presence at WeLead carries institutional context that goes beyond the forum itself. She served as Secretary of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry Guyana (WCCIG), a non-profit founded in 2019 to give women in business a collective voice in Guyana’s economy. The WCCIG is led by President Josephine Tapp-Rutherford, who herself was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Private Sector Commission’s Executive Management Committee earlier this year, a development La Caribeña News reported as placing women’s business interests at the centre of national economic decision-making for the first time.
When Stewart joined the WCCIG board in December 2024 alongside fellow board member Lexann McPhoy and Shevion Sears, the chamber described her as an operations specialist. The secretary’s chair on a young, underfunded women’s chamber is not a ceremonial post. It is where governance either holds or it does not. Those who observed her tenure use the same words: structure, follow-through, an organisation that began to feel institutional rather than aspirational.
McPhoy, who served as a fellow board member at the WCCIG, was also present at WeLead 2026, representing Women’s Haven® Guyana and her portfolio of wellness and beauty businesses. The two women’s presence in the same room at WeLead 2026 reflects the kind of interlocking network the chamber was built to create.
The secretary’s chair on a young women’s chamber is not ceremonial. It is where governance either holds or it does not.
Why WeLead was the right room
The WeLead Association, founded in 2017 by Abbigale Loncke-Watson, has built its conference into one of the most consistent cross-sector gatherings for women in Guyana’s business community. Over 300 attendees at the 2026 edition included entrepreneurs, corporate executives, ministry officials, and regional professionals, representing exactly the spread of sectors that a national transportation forum needs to reach.
Stewart’s networking objective at WeLead was not abstract. Transportation touches every business in the room. The insurer pricing fleet risk. The logistics company watching fuel costs against road conditions. The MSME owner whose supply chain depends on drivers who may or may not be trained. The HR director accounting for workforce downtime after accidents. Road safety is a cost that sits on every balance sheet in Guyana, and few people in the country have tried to put the right rooms together to address it in a structured way. Stewart is doing exactly that.
The PSC’s public statement on road culture the day before WeLead added external weight to what Stewart was already carrying into the conference. The private sector had named the problem in public. She had a forum, a date, and a venue to address it.
What the forum addresses
Beyond the Wheels 2.0 spans two days at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. The agenda covers fleet management, driver training, road-safety data, regulation, infrastructure, and the mental health dimension of transport work, a lane that rarely appears on conference agendas but that Stewart has flagged from the beginning of her public career, including through Clarke’s Productions Inc.’s men’s mental health programme, which predates the forum.
Guyana’s road context makes the timing acute. Budget 2026 allocated $196.1 billion for roads and bridges, including new four-lane highway projects and the continuation of the Demerara corridor expansion. A larger fleet is arriving into that infrastructure because oil-fuelled disposable income is accelerating vehicle ownership. The gap between road capacity, driver culture, and road-safety standards is not closing on its own. The PSC said so publicly on 26 June. Stewart has been building the platform to close it since long before they did.
The forum’s approach echoes the argument La Caribeña News outlined in its coverage of why Caribbean road safety needs local data, not imported assumptions. The region has the accidents. It does not yet have the Caribbean-specific frameworks to understand and reduce them. Beyond the Wheels 2.0 is a step toward generating those frameworks in Guyana, with enough institutional weight in the room to make the output actionable.
Guyana has the accidents. It does not yet have the Caribbean-specific frameworks to reduce them.
The operator behind the event
Stewart’s method is consistent across everything she has led. She builds the room before she opens the door. The WCCIG board work happened the same way: structure first, visibility second. Beyond the Wheels 2.0 followed the same logic. Corporate partners were locked in before the public rollout. The speaker roster was confirmed before the save-the-date went out. By the time WeLead’s 300-person room saw her on 27 June, the forum’s architecture was already substantially built.
That discipline is part of what makes the networking at WeLead consequential rather than ceremonial. Stewart was not there to announce a project. She was there to build the final partnerships a project this size requires. The WeLead Association’s conference room, built over nine years by Loncke-Watson precisely to be the kind of space where those conversations can happen, was the right venue for that work.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is Beyond the Wheels 2.0?
Beyond the Wheels 2.0 is a national transportation and safety forum organised by Carlyne Stewart of Clarke’s Productions Inc. It is scheduled for 6 and 7 October 2026 at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Georgetown, Guyana. The forum brings together insurers, logistics operators, fleet managers, public-sector officials, and road-safety researchers to address Guyana’s transportation safety challenges.
Who is Carlyne Stewart?
Carlyne Stewart is the Managing Director and Chief Experience Officer of Clarke’s Productions Inc. She served as Secretary of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry Guyana (WCCIG), joining the board in December 2024 alongside Lexann McPhoy and Shevion Sears. She is the lead organiser of Beyond the Wheels 2.0.
Why is road safety an economic issue in Guyana?
The Private Sector Commission stated publicly on 26 June 2026 that Guyana’s poor road culture is costing the country billions of dollars. Budget 2026 allocated $196.1 billion for roads and bridges, but a growing vehicle fleet driven by oil-era income is outpacing both infrastructure and road-safety standards. Insurers, logistics firms, and HR professionals are all absorbing costs that structured road-safety interventions could reduce.
What is the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry Guyana?
The WCCIG is a Guyanese non-profit founded in 2019 to give women a collective business voice. It is led by President Josephine Tapp-Rutherford, who also serves as Honorary Secretary of the Private Sector Commission’s Executive Management Committee. The chamber works to strengthen women-owned enterprises and advocates on issues including financing access and public procurement.
How does Beyond the Wheels 2.0 connect to Caribbean road safety more broadly?
La Caribeña News has reported on CARITRANS Managing Director Lacey Williams’ argument that Caribbean road-safety policy has long relied on risk models imported from outside the region rather than local data. Beyond the Wheels 2.0 aims to change that pattern for Guyana by generating a structured, cross-sector conversation grounded in local conditions.
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