Madam Speaker, it was the Minister of Finance who was disturbing me and I apologise for that. This is a fairly broad question for which there isn't a straight answer because the issues differ from agency to agency, and very often the issues that relate to resourcing matters are subject to ongoing review and are often issues that are difficult to assess according to the different circumstances of each institution.
But, in relation to the Small Enterprise Development Agency, Seda, it is important to mention that this is an organisation that has been involved in a twin process of amalgamation where we are bringing together various institutions to create one agency and at the same time it was involved in the process of rolling out new infrastructure to support small enterprise development at national, provincial and local levels.
I think that, following largely the conclusion of that process, we have a better sense of the new scale of resources that are required and where the gaps are. For the record, for this year the Small Enterprise Development Agency has had a scale of resources of R253 million. With a better sense of where the gaps are we have begun a conversation with the National Treasury around further needs for the organisation.
Secondly, in relation to Khula, more recently the work that it has been involved with has related to the expansion of its footprint, as well as the expansion of the scale of funding for small business support. This is something that has been done quite successfully by Khula and it is an ongoing task. To sustain and further scale up the resources there are issues of recapitalisation that arise in relation to Khula as the scale of resources can only be supported by the degree of capitalisation of the organisation. And again, in this regard, conversation has begun with the National Treasury to begin to explore those issues around possibly further capitalisation for the organisation.
Thirdly, the National Empowerment Fund has steadily grown in size, budget and operations over the last three years. This growth is envisaged to be sustained over the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework period. In the implementation and delivery upon its mandate the NEF has up until now each year nearly doubled its staff complement and the Department of Trade and Industry has supported these additional budget requests to allow the NEF to sustain this growth in resources and implement its operational mandate.
The NEF received transfers of R561 million from the department for 2006-07. The allocations for the MTEF period are R710 million, R470 million and R481 million, mostly for further capitalisation, and no additional funding requests are being made at this stage.
On the question about successful projects, there are few that we could cite, and these include projects funded through the NEF rural and community development programmes. One such project is a raspberry farm in the Amajuba District in KwaZulu-Natal funded in conjunction with the Industrial Development Corporation. The NEF funding portion for this project is R19,4 million.
A further transaction in support of local economic development is a community-owned dairy farm in the Middlesdrift area of the Eastern Cape, and R9 million has recently been approved for the project.
In an attempt to address the issue of local economic development, the DTI has launched the South African Micro Finance Apex Fund and the Local Enterprise Fund. To date, 707 business loans to marginalised groups have been made through the Apex Fund.
The Local Enterprise Fund was funded by the United Nations Office for Projects for three years in four of the nine provinces, namely Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga. The aim was to provide financial and nonfinancial services to the four selected district municipalities in these provinces utilising the capacities of the provincial development corporations as channels for support and funding. The pilot ... [Time expired.]