As GCCI honours excellence in business governance

All roads lead to Sheraton Hotel on Friday as the Gambia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) puts finishing touches to preparations for the 2007 GCCI Business Awards Dinner, which serves as the platform to recognize excellence for remarkable performance of entrepreneurs and enterprises in the country.

As the volume of investment and economic activity in the country continues to take an upward swing, the private sector umbrella body, over the years, has been recognizing the achievements of all major industries at play in the economy such as the banking and finance industry, manufacturing industry, tourism industry, agricultural and fishing industries, and other major players in the private-public sector realm.

The Business Awards Dinner would crown businesses and entrepreneurs that performed remarkably well in 2007 with awards such as Business Person of the Year, Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Partner to the Private Sector, SME [Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise] of the Year, Industrialist of the Year, and Service Provider of the Year.

Although the award categories this year remain the same as last year’s, but the process of obtaining nominees and winners has been changed or re-branded to ensure transparency and maximum participation by the business community and the public in selecting the deserving entrepreneurs, enterprises and companies in the economic ballgame of the country.

The yardsticks established by the GCCI in rating nominees for the impressive awards makes it crystal clear that deserving entrepreneurs or companies must have cornered the market, be ahead of the pack, or run a tight ship for any to be voted or selected as the outright winner at the end of the day, as the nomination process would always consider business modules such as corporate social responsibility, wages and salaries of employees, research and development, level of contribution to national or general tax revenue, social security, workers insurance bills, company cash flow, net profit/ loss, sales, output, investment capacity, and number of employees.

Says GCCI’s economist Sarata Conateh: "The only difference this year is the process we have used to obtain the nominees as well as the winners. The year before last we had an award committee within the chamber that was responsible for selecting the nominees as well as the winners for the award, and then last year we experimented sending out nominees’ forms to the business community in general, not only to our members. And after the forms were sent back to the office, we then counted the votes and the winner was determined.

"This year we are even more determined to make it more participatory, transparent and credible, for that matter, by outsourcing it to a research team having sent them the nomination forms similar to the ones we had used last year with the same criteria.

Almost over 300 companies have had the opportunity to fill the nomination forms and give the chamber an opinion of who they believe are the deserving nominees for the various categories that we have outlined. That was the 1st phase – getting the private sector to vote using the nomination forms that we have prepared for them.

‘The second phase is the business performance index. This phase contains much more detailed and relevant information that we require to determine the actual winner.

For instance, after the nomination forms came back to us and the votes were counted for the various nominees that we have right now, it does not stop there, because even if you have acquired more votes for an individual entrepreneur – for instance the Business Person of the Year – he or she is not necessarily the winner.

That is where the second phase is important. The BPI [the Business Profitability Index] will now look into the wages and salaries for the individual companies’ staff; it will also look into the turnover, the leadership qualities, employment creation for that particular year, tax payment for the entire year to know whether a company or an enterprise has fulfilled its tax commitment to the state. So all of that, in addition to the number of votes that a business or an entrepreneur has acquired through public voting, would determine the winner for each category."

Some of the objectives of the Business Award are to provide a unique opportunity for GCCI to recognize excellence for remarkable performance of entrepreneurs and enterprises in the private sector and to provide an environment where members and non-members of the GCCI can meet and network with one another outside their business entities.

"The past two years, GCCI has embarked on a new drive to re-brand this event as an Awards night with a view to further galvanize the Private Sector operators to unanimously work towards private sector development and achieving the objectives of Vision 2020," noted Mrs Conateh, the dinner coordinator.

"In this vein, we aim to deliver a new format focused around a prestigious award night filled with pre-dinner television features of nominees and also eye-catching visual presentations and bio-data profiling of award nominees. Also we believe that winning a GCCI business award should elevate the profile of the winner and further energize and entice others to look forward to having such privilege the next year round."

To be continued