The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has effected revisions to the current Black Business Supplier Development Programme (BBSDP).

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies approved revised guidelines on June 12, prompting the need to step up measures to enhance the competitiveness of local, black-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The DTI said that applications under the current programme would be accepted until the end of August, after which these would be replaced with the new guidelines, to be published on the DTI website at the end of September.

The revised BBSDP will be effective as of April 2010.

Amendments to the current BBSDP are primarily aimed at assisting black-owned SMEs to acquire productivity-enhancing technology. The revised guidelines further seek to enhance assistance to targeted enterprises and, in so doing, to enable them to access opportunities created by the broad-based black economic-empowerment policies of government, and supply goods and services to the corporate sector, parastatals and government.

In order to enable access to the revised programme, the DTI would also introduce a structured training programme for network facilitators, which would enable them to identify interventions that would contribute towards the competitiveness of local enterprises.

From its inception in 2002 to the end of July, the BBSDP has shown growth of about 800%. A total of 6 409 enterprises have benefited from the programme and an amount of R268,8-million has since been disbursed.