The South African Future Trust (the SA Future Trust) has vowed to launch a new and improved second version of financial and non-financial support to thousands of small businesses in a bid to accelerate growth and job creation in the small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMME) sector.
In March 2020, the SA Future Trust was established with a R1 billion donation from the Oppenheimer Generations Foundation to support small businesses through the Covid-19 crisis.
The SA Future Trust extended direct financial support to businesses so that their employees could continue to receive an income through the lockdown period.
This was done by providing interest-free loans to more than 10 000 qualifying SMMEs through a partnership with six South African banks which facilitated the process.
SA Future Trust founder Jonathan Oppenheimer said yesterday that the SA Future Trust 2.0 would take a holistic approach to assisting small businesses as it would look carefully at individual business needs and intervene accordingly.
Speaking at the inaugural SA Future Trust Summit, Oppenheimer said they now had the opportunity to study the varying challenges that SMMEs were facing as the economy was evolving past the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The 2.0 is a major step from what was a crisis management opportunity where we reached into small businesses and helped them in an immediate instantaneous crisis,” Oppenheimer said.
“Now we have the opportunity to really actually step back a little bit, do a little bit more careful analysis, and what we are designing is a series of tools which will help communities, led by small businesses, to become more cohesive, more dynamic and more trusting of one another.
Oppenheimer emphasised that the main thing this country needed to grow its economy were people and entrepreneurs who were more into action, action, and action.
“If you spend your time designing, you'll never get anything done. We need implementation, we need action, we need delivery, we need new roads, we need new railway lines, we need new factories,” he said.
“And if there’s an opportunity, we’ll go and exploit it. We can hustle for success. We will hustle for success.”
Melon Mobile, which offers SMMEs a range of services to manage mobile usage in their businesses, launched their new products and services offered in partnership with the Trust.
This comes just six months after Melon Mobile entered the highly competitive mobile sector with a new, consumer-centric business model.
The second was the launch of a solution to help entrepreneurs leverage their title deeds to unlock business opportunities, which will go live in 2024.
Ashleigh Fynn Munda, the head of philanthropies at Oppenheimer Generations, said the Trust, with partners the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF) and the tenure support centre 71point4, was designed to help entrepreneurs leverage the value of their fixed assets.
She said this would, for example, enable them to build rental accommodation on their properties, unlocking as much R546bn in asset value.
The founder and leader of Minanawe Marketing, GG Alcock, also presented an informative case study on the potential of the billions of rand worth in the informal sector titled Kasinomics Revolution.
“Insight into entrepreneurial success stories are both uplifting and informative,” Alcock said.
“They give local entrepreneurs examples of the potential inherent in entrepreneurship – and offer models they can draw on in their own businesses.”
BUSINESS REPORT