Women Now Shape Two of Five Top Seats at Guyana’s Private Sector Commission

With the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry Guyana joining the Executive Management Committee and Kathy Smith re-affirmed as Vice Chairwoman, women’s business voice has never sat closer to the centre of national economic decision-making.

Georgetown, Guyana — Early reporting reaching La Caribeña News points to a quietly historic moment in Guyana’s business community. The Private Sector Commission (PSC), the umbrella body that speaks for the country’s leading companies and trade groups, has returned its core leadership team to office and, in the same breath, widened the room at the top for women.

The re-elected Executive Management Committee (EMC) is led by Chairman Captain Gerald Gouveia Jr., with Kathy Smith continuing as Vice Chairwoman, Imran Saccoor as Treasurer, and Manniram Prashad as Corporate Coordinator. Joining them is Josephine Tapp, President of the WCCIG, as PSC Honorary Secretary. Some in the business community have already framed the development in striking terms — that the women’s chamber “now controls” the Private Sector Commission. The mechanics are more measured than that. The shift it describes is real: two of the five EMC seats are now held by women, at the very moment Guyana’s economy is being remade.

Why two seats out of five matters

Numbers tell part of the story. The EMC is the small group where the PSC’s day-to-day direction is set, where positions are weighed before they reach the wider membership or the public. A single seat at that table carries weight. Two seats, held by women who lead organisations of their own, changes the texture of the conversation.

Kathy Smith brings the perspective of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), which she leads. Josephine Tapp brings the WCCIG, a chamber built specifically to advance women in business. For the first time, that women-focused chamber has a direct voice inside the Commission’s inner circle. The practical effect is that issues women entrepreneurs have long raised — access to finance, the burden of unpaid care work, fairer terms in public procurement — now have advocates seated where decisions begin, not just where they are received.

Kathy Smith: a record of firsts

Smith’s re-affirmation as Vice Chairwoman is notable on its own. When she was first elected to the role, she became the first woman ever to serve as Vice Chair of the PSC. That milestone sits inside a longer run of firsts. In 2025 she became the first female President of the GCCI in the chamber’s 136-year history, and she also became the first woman to chair the Board of Industrial Training, an institution more than a century old.

Her path was not a straight line through boardrooms. Smith began her career as a teacher before earning a degree in business management at the University of Guyana, and she now serves as Managing Director of Dynotech Construction Chemicals Inc. A woman leading a construction-sector company, in a field still widely read as male, is part of what makes her presence at the PSC table resonate beyond protocol.

Josephine Tapp and the chamber she leads

Josephine Tapp comes to the EMC as President of the WCCIG, a role she holds for a second term. Trained in law, she earned her Bachelor of Laws at the University of Guyana and a Master of Laws from the University of London, and she works in her family’s civil works business. Within the chamber she has also chaired its advocacy and governance work, the engine room for turning members’ concerns into policy positions.

The WCCIG itself is young but deliberate. Founded in 2019 as a non-profit dedicated to giving women a collective business voice, it works to strengthen women-owned enterprises and to chip away at structural barriers — from the difficulty of raising capital to the unpaid labour that keeps many women out of formal markets. Earlier this year La Caribeña News reported on the chamber’s push for women’s economic rights at a regional forum; readers can revisit that coverage here: Guyana, the OAS and the fight for women’s economic rights.

A signal for social cohesion

The timing carries meaning. Guyana is moving through one of the fastest economic transformations in the hemisphere, and the question of who shares in that growth is never far from public debate. A private sector that visibly makes room for women sends a message about the kind of prosperity the country is building — one measured not only in output, but in who gets to shape it.

That message lands because it is backed by example, not slogans. Across Georgetown, women are already filling gaps the market left open and building firms that did not exist a few years ago.

La Caribeña News has profiled some of them, including the woman-owned concierge firm filling Georgetown’s executive-support gap, and entrepreneur Carlyne Stewart, whose work was featured around the Beyond the Wheels Guyana transportation forum. Read alongside the PSC news, these stories describe the same current: women moving from the margins of enterprise toward its decision-making core.

What to watch next

The early reporting frames this as a leadership renewal rather than a change of guard — the same chairman, the same treasurer, the same coordinator, steadied by continuity. What is new is the company they keep. With Smith in the Vice Chair and Tapp now seated beside her, the PSC carries two women into the heart of its agenda-setting at a defining national moment.

Whether that representation translates into policy wins — easier credit for women-led firms, procurement rules that open real doors, support that recognises the care economy — is the test that follows the headline. For now, the picture is encouraging, and it is worth marking plainly: in the room where Guyana’s private sector charts its course, women are finally getting their due.

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