Will the budget offer support for young people and women entrepreneurs?

A recent report revealed that women-run businesses have the potential to boost the economy by R175 billion by 2022, creating 972 000 jobs in the process.

It’s little wonder then that President Cyril Ramaphosa paid particular attention to investing in female entrepreneurship in his recent state of the nation address (Sona), announcing that the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) is targeting R10 billion of own and partner funding for women-empowered businesses over the next five years.

A platform assisting women-owned businesses to participate in global value chains and markets was also launched.

This is encouraging since investing in female-run businesses positively impacts on families and communities as women are more likely to invest in health and education.

These women also become role models for the next generation, inculcating a culture of entrepreneurship among our youth, while also acting as inspiration for other women.

The former is particularly important because, of the 1.2 million young people who enter the job market each year, about two thirds remain outside of employment, education or training. Minimising youth unemployment – which now sits at a staggering 55% - is critical; we need to turn our young job-seekers into job creators. 

Positively, there has been much support for including entrepreneurship in the national curriculum. Ramaphosa weighed into the debate last November at the Investment Conference and publically announced that he would like to see entrepreneurship taught in schools to develop a culture of self-employment from an early age. 

The threat of technology 

This support couldn’t come sooner. Digitisation, which is happening across industries with a view to streamline processes, cut back on costs and enable innovation, is having a negative impact on employment. Now, entrants into the market are not only competing with each other to secure employment, but also with technology.

Among these are the retail and banking sector. With the introduction of behavioural banking (Discovery) and change in online behaviour associated with digital banks (Tymebank), this transformation has led to lower employment rates in comparison to the Big Five’s making it much harder to secure a job.

With lower employment and retrenchments lurking, job creation in the entrepreneurial and small business (informal) sector has never been more important.

Adaptation, continuous learning and agility becomes the soft skills of the future if we want to combat the millions of jobs being automated in the near future. 

Young people critically need the entrepreneurial skills to pave their own way and gain independence and Ramaphosa’s suggestion of coding and robotics in grades R to 3 in 200 schools with a plan to implement it fully by 2022 is welcomed.

Technical skills and qualifications will become increasingly important and the establishment of a new university of science and innovation in Ekurhuleni is encouraging as it will enable young people in that metro to be trained in high-impact and cutting-edge technological innovation for current and future industries. 

Eating an elephant bite by bite 

There’s no doubt that women and our youth are among our most vulnerable and I applaud the president for presenting initiatives that will directly affect them. But is it enough?

No matter how many skills one person can acquire through training, or how much finance they can secure, the fact remains: our economy is stalling with glacier-like GDP growth after it sank into a technical recession in the fourth quarter of last year.

Rolling black-outs from Eskom are not helping. Although not an immediate fix, the president announced that government is taking measures to increase alternative power solutions and generator capacity outside of Eskom and will continue to implement its plans to turn Eskom around. This at least is a step in the right direction. He’s also committed to assisting 100,000 young entrepreneurs over the next three years to access business skills training, funding and market facilitation.

We now turn our eyes towards the 2020 budget speech and hope – amid these challenging times - that Finance Minister Tito Mboweni will table a meaningful portion of the budget to support small business growth, with particular focus on uplifting the youth and women. 

Louw is chief brand officer at Retail Capital

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