Written By : Jivan Daniel Louis
The route to post-Covid economic recovery is paradoxically as simple as it is complicated. The ideal scenario would be that industrial and trading organisations return to their pre-Covid operational potential to give people their lost jobs back and rejuvenate government revenues.
Unfortunately, that process may not prove to be as simple as it may seem. The world economy has slowed down and would take its own time to regain full steam, which would affect Malaysia’s economy just like other economies.
Furthermore, a lot of businesses have shut down or downsized and may never be the same again. The middle class would need time to indulge in lavish consumer spending.
So, where will the much-needed jobs and revenues come from? We should bring forth more and more small-scale entrepreneurs. But what kind of small entrepreneurs? Online freelancing is past its saturation levels now.
Too many small retail businesses, particularly pushcart vendors, hawkers have sprung up all around outnumbering their customers.
That’s an extraordinary scenario which merits extraordinary ideas such as the idea of growing the “bumi-economy” or more frankly called the “bumiconomy” that could be our indigenous term for Earth economy.
The idea is to increase the number of small scale entrepreneurs engaged in businesses with Earth relevant activities such as recycling palm trees waste into other forms of usable material like fertilizers, wooden boards; collecting cut-pieces and other clothing leftovers from garment factories and turning them into reusable washable cloth bags to replace plastic shopping bags at retail or collecting tree waste from parks and forests and turning it into organic fertilizer.
Other examples include the so called Bumipreneurs recycling and performing safe disposal of green energy waste such as batteries used in solar energy units, electric vehicles’ chargers; averting human and cattle waste from going into natural water bodies and turning it into bio energy; collect domestic and commercial waste from natural water bodies for safe disposal or recycling; sorting domestic trash into recyclable and non-recyclable waste and selling it to recycling facilities; producing and dyeing cloth with organic colours; running organic food eateries and making organic honey.
Perhaps, the Bumipreneurs can work with departmental stores, restaurants and other such establishments to save food waste and sell the saved safe food on subsidized rates to food insecure communities; running mobile solar business, going to far flung settlements on their mobile solar shops and selling and installing solar energy units for residential and agricultural use; buying organic dairy produce from small farmers and rural women and transporting and selling in cities, developing roof gardens and roof farms; conducting electric vehicle charging business, recycling used clothes; providing and furnishing homes and other indoors with air purifying indoor plants and performing their maintenance.
These are some of the examples of bumipreneurship ideas, there can be many more. Then the question is, how will they arrange the required finances. The government is already under Covid affected financial strain and banks might have complicated procedures for simple people to get business loans.
Not everyone can pledge property to secure bank loans. In such a case, we would need extraordinary business funding ideas. One such idea could be the establishment of “Bumiconomy Fund” which could be formed by collaboration of private banks, investor companies and investor individuals.
The fund will invite business proposals along with basic feasibility report from would be bumipreneurs and provide funding on profit and loss sharing. In order to make the funding process simple and practical for common people to become bumipreneurs, other items other than properties would be pledged as security.
The profit and loss ratios would be determined on the business plans and feasibility reports and a committee of “Bumiconomy Fund” will perform random business audits to ensure transparency and avert fraud.
Let the “Bumiconomy” help develop better and greener Malaysia whille pushing for quicker greater post Covid economic recovery.
