Programme Director;
His Excellency, President Cyril Ramaphosa;
Honourable Minister for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Mr Velenkosini Hlabisa;
Honourable Ministers; Deputy Ministers
Honourable Premier of Province Mr Lesufi Panyaza,
Honourable MEC’s
President of the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), Cllr Bheki Stofile;
Chairperson of the National House of Traditional and Khoisan Leaders, Kgosi Seatlholo;
Distinguished Cabinet Colleagues, Directors-General, and CEOs of our Development Finance Institutions;
Executive Mayors, Councillors, and LED Practitioners;
Academic Institutions;

Our, Agencies, partners in the private sector and representatives of the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises sector.

Entrepreneurs

We gather at a defining moment in our country’s development journey, one that calls for bold leadership and decisive action.

There is much we are doing well.

Structural reforms in energy and logistics have unlocked capacity in electricity generation, transmission, freight rail, and ports. Inflation has stabilised, fiscal discipline has improved, and investor confidence has grown, even as the tumultuous geo-politics threatens to disrupt our progress.

At the same time, levels of unemployment and inequality remain high. Economic exclusion remains our foremost binding growth constraint.

The Government of National Unity has made inclusive growth and job creation its apex priority, with MSMEs at the centre.

This aligns with the National Development Plan which suggests 9 million of the targeted 11 million should come from MSMEs.

To achieve this, we require a fully functional and coordinated ecosystem for small enterprise development. Government alone cannot deliver at the required scale.

Our mandate as the Department of Small Business Development is to lead and coordinate this support eco-system.

To enable this, we have made several recent policy interventions. These include the MSME and Co-operatives Funding Policy, the Red-Tape Reduction Framework, the Business Licensing Bill, the National Entrepreneurship Strategy, the Incubation and Business Development Services Policy, and the Township and Rural Economic Development and Revitalisation Policy.

Some of these policies are approved by Cabinet. Others are undergoing the final process of public consultation.

In terms of executing these policies, we implement several programmes through which we plan to support 1 million MSMEs and cooperatives with financial and non-financial support over this 7th Administration.

Our instruments include business infrastructure support grants, where we co-create MSME hubs in partnership with state and non-state partners.

We develop incubators, and have developed 118 to date, many in partnership with the private sector, universities and TVET colleges.

We have the Asset Assist Programme where we provide equipment grants for MSMEs and co-operatives, as well as the Informal Micro Enterprise Development Programme where we provide equipment and business support to informal enterprises.

We also provide a range of support interventions to assist with market access, both in terms of localized supply chains and export markets, especially targeting new markets like BRICS+ and ACFTA.

Then we have a range of blended finance instruments, many of which we implement with our DFI, SEDFA. These include the Township and Rural Entrepreneurship Programme, the Small Manufacturer Development Support Programme, the Co-operatives Development Support Programme, the Spaza Shop Support Fund, and new instruments like the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund and Youth Entrepreneurship Fund which we are fine-tuning before official launch.

We also offer credit guarantees to leverage bank and non-bank finance, as well as direct lending and wholesale finance.

In all these cases, we are integrating pre-investment and post-investment business development support, which has been enabled through the merger of Seda, sefa and the Co-operative Banks Development Agency. This has given us the one-stop-shop agency the ecosystem needed – SEDFA- which we are further enabling through a digital platform.

Programme Director

These policy reforms and programmes require close collaboration with provinces and municipalities to succeed.

The reality is clear. South Africa’s growth and jobs challenge will be won or lost at a local level. Whether it is a local spaza shop, a farmer producing for export, a high growth tech startup, or a community cooperative, the trajectory of our economy is ultimately shaped in our municipalities and districts.

Municipalities are where people first and foremost experience government services and where trust for government is built or eroded.

Municipalities are where investors and MSMEs foremost experience red-tape and the ease of doing business.

The ongoing review of the White Paper on Local Government is therefore both timely and necessary. It seeks to address persistent challenges, including weak institutional

capacity, service delivery constraints, fiscal pressures, and a lack of coordination across the system.

Our goal must be clear, to build municipalities that are capable, accountable, and truly developmental institutions that act as economic enablers, not merely administrative bodies.

This requires a mindset shift in how we view LED.

Being an economic enabler means improving the ease of doing business, through reducing licensing turnaround times, reforming municipal bylaws that constrain trading and zoning, improving access to wayleaves for digital infrastructure, and addressing regulatory bottlenecks that limit business expansion.

It means reviewing LED strategies to ensure catalytic sectors are clearly identified based on comparative advantage, which then shape spatial planning and design, infrastructure resource allocation, and priorities in the DDM One-Plans.

It means improving municipal services and expanding access to infrastructure, especially for township areas which should be developed with clearly zoned commercial precincts with high streets and production hubs.

This is the essence of the Collaborative Blueprint we want to achieve over the next two days. A call to action to “Re-engineer Local Economies,” to fundamentally transform how economic activity is structured, supported, and sustained within our municipalities, districts, townships, and rural communities.

As we engage in these discussions, we must remain firmly grounded in the lived realities of entrepreneurs. Those operating in townships, rural areas, and urban centres experience firsthand the barriers we seek to dismantle. Their voices must be heard. They must actively shape our priorities and the programme of action we seek to develop.

This will ensure that the outcomes of this Summit are practical, implementable, and ultimately, that they deliver meaningful change where it matters most, on the ground.

I thank you.