President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Monday that more entrepreneurship can be achieved in South Africa through better and stronger collaboration between government and business.
The president emphasised that with the additional backing of labour and civil society South Africans and especially women have the ability to lift themselves out of poverty.
“With greater collaboration between government and business, together with the support of labour and civil society, we can use entrepreneurship to lift more women out of poverty.
“We can create more jobs for women and help more women secure their financial freedom,” he said.
Government and the private sector are encouraging entrepreneurship through start-up incubators, women entrepreneurship awards and programmes such as the Youth Employment Service, the president said.
He said that the Social Employment Fund is helping women entrepreneurs and in turn these female leaders are hiring more workers, providing more mentorship and training more unemployed South Africans.
“There is much more that the private sector can do. Access to financial resources, including credit lines, is vital to the viability of women-owned businesses,” he explained.
“Another important area is access to tools of financial inclusion like bank accounts and mobile money and payment technologies.
“It will be critical to broaden the reach of financial services to include women in the informal sector and in rural areas”.
Ramaphosa made it clear that women contribute enormously to thriving economies and this in turn spurs productivity and boosts economic growth.
More still needs to be done for women
South Africa has the highest rate of unemployed women and women not in the workforce, according to the president and moreover the percentage of South African women considered to be self-employed or entrepreneurs is at 5%.
Ramaphosa said that, in this respect, South Africa lags behind the rest of the continent.
He noted that according to the World Economic Forum, women constitute 58% of self-employed people across Africa.
“In a country such as ours, with a high unemployment rate, entrepreneurship is an important tool to empower more women and broaden their participation in the economy.
“This includes in the informal sector, which accounts for 18% of total employment in the country,” the president said.
He said that South Africa has allocated at least 40% of public procurement spend to women-owned businesses.
“In 2021, we launched a Women’s Economic Assembly to enable women-owned enterprises to participate in local industry value chains,” the president said
“Since its inception, this programme has yielded promising results in a number of key economic sectors, notably the automotive sector,” Ramaphosa noted.
Lastly, he said that government is striving to expand women’s access to economic activity through land ownership by enabling female farmers to own land through the SA’s land redistribution programme.
IOL BUSINESS