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Raise standard of business support to help SA recover
27 November 2009
The recession may officially be over but, with another million citizens unemployed, South Africa needs to get better at helping people start and run small businesses, according to the National Consumer Forum.
The country has a number of business support organisations (BSOs) at national, provincial and local level which could be powerful drivers of enterprise. However, many of these agencies have not performed to expectations, according to NCF chairman Thami Bolani, and the public has often lost faith in them.
"Now is the time that the country needs these agencies more than ever - to provide new jobs where others have been lost, and to nurture employed and unemployed people who have entrepreneurial flair," he said.
So BSOs need to raise their game - and to that, they need standards to guide and measure the quality of the support services they offer. "There has been much 'wandering in the wilderness' among many of the support agencies that government and provinces have set up," said Bolani, "and a key reason is that they have not had clear standards by which to rate themselves, identify weaknesses, and make improvements."
He said that across the world governments have realised the need to set standards for small business support - not just for the individuals who give advice but for the institutions that employ the advisers and offer other services.
More recently, European Union countries have developed a common set of standards based on their combined experience. "We could learn from this valuable initiative, and save ourselves another decade of making the same mistakes again and again," said Bolani.
"The president has emphasised better value for money for tax-payers from now on, and BSOs need to see the value of adopting standards and striving for these every day," he said. "We are losing the battle against unemployment and unless we can create more entrepreneurs, our economy will remain unbalanced and fragile. This is not good for either consumers or producers."
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