The Provincial Treasury’s Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) Outreach Program, which aims to provide rural-based small enterprises with a variety of business skills and financial options, will be led by KZN Finance MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube on Saturday.
The goal of the SMMEs outreach programme, which will be hosted at Bhambanana in the Jozini Local Municipality, is to provide young people with a variety of business skills and financial opportunities. This programme follows the Youth-in-Business Outreach Programme, which was recently held in uThukela.
After the uThukela Youth-In-Business Outreach Programme’s overwhelming success, Dube-Ncube claimed there was a need to expand into more districts in order to remove obstacles that rural-based SMMEs and small enterprises have while trying to obtain financing and maintain their operations.
She claimed that COVID-19 and the unrest events in July of last year were particularly hard on SMMEs and other small enterprises, leaving them in poor condition.
“This has affected mostly rural businesses, especially those owned by Africans residing in far flung areas. These include in small towns that often struggle with access to information on how to efficiently run their businesses, access business finance… [and] information related to government’s supply chain protocols,” Dube-Ncube said.
The department will make its central suppliers database unit, operation-pay-on-time, and supply chain management more accessible during the outreach programme.
The South African Revenue Service, Ithala, the National Youth Development Agency, and a number of other business services organisations will all set up exhibition stands with readily available information and services.
“The entire package of information is sacrosanct in order to mitigate the high rate of unemployment that mostly affects the province and the country,” the MEC said.