Sascha-Lee Joseph
Small businesses in the City of Johannesburg will benefit from a new multimillion rand fund. Through a partnership between Sourcefin and Gauteng Enterprise Propeller (GEP), the collaboration will provide access to R150 million in funding and support for small businesses SMMEs and co-operatives.
Sourcefin CEO Joshua Kadish believes it is the perfect marriage partnership to enable small businesses to deliver on their promise.
“The reason this partnership personally resonates with us is because during Covid-19 we took the brave decision as young entrepreneurs to open up a new start up and with a clear purpose to ensure we enable SMMEs to deliver on their promises by supporting and improving service delivery in communities across the country,” said Kadish.
He said that although the SMMEs contributed about R3 trillion to the GDP, Sourcefin has found that there is still a funding gap of over R4 billion small businesses in South Africa.
Sourcefin will also be providing a range of strategic training to SMMEs. “After sitting down with the GEP we discovered that finance alone is not what’s going to help these SMMEs. We need to be able to ensure adequate training in essential services are going to establish growth and sustainability.”
“We have sat with the GEP and strategised so that we can align our mandates and ensure that we cover the broadest range of different transactions and collectively assist a much larger array of SMMEs with all different value needs.
“We will also support the GEP in areas where they may need such as through our technology and innovations and any other networks they need at no additional cost,” said Kadish.
Gauteng’s Director-General for Ministry of Small Business, Thulisile Manzini, said SMMEs including co-operatives form an integral part of the South African economy.
“SMMEs are seen as the engines of growth and the sector that will provide the most job opportunities. The national development plan envisages that 90% of the 11 million jobs will be generated by SMMEs in 2030,” said Manzini.
She said SMMEs are also at the forefront of addressing poverty and creating much needed employment.
“The mandate of the GEP is to assist small enterprises with financial and non-financial support. The collaboration with Sourcefin as a financial specialist and the two aligning mandates can only bring about positive opportunities for SMMEs in South Africa,” she said.
Manzini said this partnership will contribute positively to the process of defragmenting the sector with a view of improving coordination on funding activities in the country.
“The launch of this specific partnership brings access to additional one million budget per annum from Sourcefin, which will benefit SMMEs that cannot be funded by GEP,” said GEP CEO Saki Zamxaka.
Zamxaka said that the partnership can bring effective funding solutions to SMMEs and meaningfully grow the economy while increasing job opportunity within South Africa. Sourcefin has already successfully collaborated with the City of Johannesburg advancing over R85 million to beneficiaries to GEP and the City in previous three months.
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