Young Soweto entrepreneurs: Organising for small business advocacy

Key Points:

After ten years of good intentions, the result of the state-driven delivery approach to entrepreneurial support has not been impressive. If South Africa is to overcome its pressing challenges of unemployment and poverty, it urgently needs to become a more entrepreneurial society.
The emphasis of any programme seeking to promote entrepreneurship should be on reducing the costs of, and eliminating other barriers to, small business start-ups and business development in general.

Although there has been a large increase in small and micro-business start-ups over the past decade, survival rates have also been low and a critical mass of small enterprise has yet to be integrated into a number of sub-sectors.
Solutions to these continuing challenges will not be easy to find, but the young entrepreneurs who contributed to this project have shown us that energetic risk-taskers and enterprise-builders do exist in places such as Soweto.