The major challenge facing the department is insufficient funding of the department and the agencies that are supposed to support small businesses. To leverage that, we are trying to establish mechanisms of partnering with private sector and the international community on expanding the pool to have funding for SMMEs, as well as support programmes for SMMEs. That has been the major issue facing municipalities.
Also, the second major issue is that there has not been a co- ordination of policy in terms of supporting SMMEs. The private sector does its own things and government also does its own things. Government does not even do it form one point; they do it from across the points. So, we are currently working on drafting an SMME funding policy for South Africa to make sure that how we regulate funding for SMMEs can make an impact across all SMMEs. Not that they should be choosing and picking of particular areas, but we can spread the same across.
The third issue we are working on is that even when we did enterprise development - our incubation or just enterprise
development programme - there has not been a national standard of guidelines, for saying this is how you do enterprise development, either at an incubational level or at a corporate level. So, we are working to develop guidelines and standards that would be adhered to both by private sector enterprise and supply development, and also at incubators by both government and private driven incubation services. Thank you.