We are blessed as a country with a plethora of business support entities whose mandate is to provide information, guidance and finance to small, emerging and existing enterprises across all sectors of the economy.

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These entities exist at a national, provincial and local government level, and with the huge budgets allocated to them in total, one would expect our economy to be characterised by a huge number of small and existing businesses in a constant state of growth.

Questions

Alas this is not the case, and questions need to be asked as to why the likes of the Small Enterprise Development Agency (SEDA), Small Enterprise Finance Agency (SEFA), and  the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) to name a few are not achieving their goals and executing their mandates fully.

In my interactions with some of these entities, I have identified the following constraints:

 Too much of their budgets being consumed by operational expenses, leaving little available for actual support of small business

 Complicated and ‘red tape heavy’ application processes

 Not enough focus on the competitive and comparative advantages of local economies

 Insufficient post-funding support and mentorship

 Inadequate leveraging of private sector expertise and support

Missed opportunities

Furthermore, there is often little or no alignment between the efforts of different government departments and local and district programmes, leading to duplication and missed opportunities to pool resources towards a common outcome.

There is a strong case to be made for a vigorous reassessment of roles and mandates of the current support institutions with a view to streamlining and refocusing their operations.

In addition, the ‘corporate’ operational model adopted by almost all of the entities adds layers of bureaucracy, leading to slow decision making, and adds dramatically to the cost of operations as all have boards of directors overseeing them, with all the attendant expenses.

After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, he joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.

He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.

Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.

More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.

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