Pretoria - An initiative called Innovation Bridge Start-Up Community, which was launched yesterday at the CSIR, has been hailed as a step in the right direction to create new jobs.
The initiative has seen the World Bank, the departments of Science and Innovation and Small Business Development collaborating on a digital solution to assist innovation start-ups led by youth to access finance, markets and business support services.
Department of Science and Innovation director-general, Dr Phil Mjwara, told participants during the launch that the job market was bound to change in future and that entrepreneurs must think innovatively.
“The world we are living in and the job market is going to change and therefore we need to start thinking about how to replace those jobs that are gone with something slightly different,” Mjwara said.
He cited an example of a number of travel agencies that have automated their work.
“You probably have not been to the bank in the last year or even two years because you have an app on your phone that you use. And so you can start asking yourself what happened to the tellers that were responsible for these jobs. In retail we know that sometimes you have to order from home and that means that some jobs have been lost,” he said.
He said South Africa and Southern Africa were not short of people with innovative ideas.
However, he said keeping entrepreneurs with innovative ideas on the continent was at times a challenge due to lack of ecosystem support.
Marie Francoise Marie-Nelly, country director for Southern Africa at the World Bank, said the initiative was also joined by participants from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia.
She said the idea was to assist the entrepreneurs’ start-ups to achieve their dreams, and should include people in townships and women.
According to her, the critical issues that needed to be addressed to make the initiative work for participants were access to finance, skills gap and legal constraints.
Deputy minister of small business and development, Sdumo Dlamini, said the small micro medium enterprises were at the centre of the country’s economic recovery.
“To achieve this we have developed a national integrated small enterprise development master plan,” he said.
He said the government, through the presidency office, was busy working to reduce red tape in order to make the way of doing business easy.
Michelle Harding, project manager at CSIR, said: “Entrepreneurs do not necessarily have the funds themselves to develop products and services and they should be able to draw from the basket of innovations and support services funded by the government in order to establish or grow the business.”
Harding said that through strategic partnership with the department of small businesses and development, red tape for entrepreneurs would be reduced to ease the process of applying for relevant funding opportunities.
“Via the partnership we will have access to 50 district offices where entrepreneurs can receive face to face assistance,” she said.
In attendance there were also 14 young entrepreneurs, who shared information about their innovative businesses.
One of them was David Thomas, who was behind the establishment of a business called Abela App, which is a mobile payments platform that allows you to make and receive payments.
Another participant, Tswelelo Mashita of Abiri Innovations, which specialises in solving the problem of poor digital integration through mapping systems and livestock tracking and monitoring in peri-urban and rural areas.
Pretoria News