We have the Tourism Grading Support Programme. We encourage all our facilities to be graded. Grading ensures quality as it meets the maximum standard that a tourist will expect and require. The Tourism Grading Support Programme allows us to give small, emerging businesses an 80% to 90% reduction in the charge for them to be graded.
We also have the Lilizela Awards programme which is beginning to encourage emerging small businesses to be able to participate in whatsoever activities are taking place.
We attend international shows. We take a number of small businesses from each province along with us to these shows. Either it is SA Tourism or it is ourselves as a department.
This is an approach that we have agreed upon. It gives them exposure to the international market. Recently there was a World Tourism Market in London. We took various small businesspeople to go and sell themselves on the international market. We attended some exhibitions. In all those exhibitions we agreed with provinces for them to give us these small businesspeople so that we are able to go together with them.
So we have acknowledged that there is a challenge in terms of them being exposed to international markets. We have taken it as our responsibility to make sure that, when we have international events, exhibitions, conferences, we are able to identify these small and medium enterprises, SMEs, and be able to pay for their accommodation, travelling and everything so that they are able to go there and be able to sell the products they have. It's some of the things we are trying to facilitate.
So government is not ignoring them. We have acknowledged that the industry is dominated by SMEs. The majority of these SMEs are owned by black people.
Therefore we have an obligation to make sure that we expose them into the markets so that they are able to benefit at the day.
So, we are working on this matter. We will be turning the corner. We want to make sure that their businesses become successful at the end. That's why I said we want them to move from small to big businesses at the end.