Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies says that there is a need to review Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) strategy.

"There's need to review the strategy, look at what is working and not working, look at how effective we can make BEE work in order to enhance its impact overall and in particular how we use it to make sure we are developing real productive capacity by black people who have been excluded from the economy," the minister said on Monday.

Speaking at a Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BB-BEE) seminar organised by the National Empowerment Fund (NEF), Minister Davies said that the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has noted that although BEE's success has been modest, there is a need to review BEE strategy.

Minister Davies said that BEE had reached an important and challenging crossroads and the newly established BEE Advisory Council would play a pivotal role in advising on the way forward for BB-BEE.

Also speaking at the seminar, NEF CEO Philiswa Buthelezi said BEE transactions needed to be structured with a bias towards supporting black people that were operational in the investee companies.

She said that for BEE to be successful the focus needed to move to a stage where BEE parties were the operational champions in the target companies, driving operational performance, transformation and economic growth.

"BEE, we propose, should also increasingly focus on the creation of new businesses and economic capacity by Black entrepreneurs,'' she said.

The historic seminar billed as the NEF BB-BEE Vision 2020, was called "to review the performance to date of BB-BEE, and to chart a new set of aspirations for every sector of the economy, which we hope will be accomplished by year 2020," Buthelezi said.

As a driver of the Codes of Good Practice for Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, the NEF has developed finance products ranging from R250 000 up to R75-million for black entrepreneurs.

The NEF BB-BEE Vision 2020 brought together stakeholders from government and the private sector to examine milestones attained to date and some of the unintended consequences of BB-BEE.

The seminar was attended by key thought-leaders, and speakers included Cyril Ramaphosa, Dr Mathews Phosa, Jimmy Manyi, Sandile Zungu and Prof Andre Schreuder, while the sector co-chairs included leaders from across the economic spectrum.