02 Aug 2020

Assistant Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Mr Karabo Gare has told Parliament on Thursday that his  ministry, through the local Enterprise Authority, promotes Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) both in rural and urban areas, by implementing various interventions aimed at improving competitiveness of enterprises.

Answering a question in Parliament, Mr Gare said one of the initiatives was facilitation of market linkages, which aimed to assist SMMEs to supply both private enterprises and public institutions with goods and services. 

To ensure that SMMEs were able to fully exploit the market linkage opportunities, he said LEA provided product and process quality enhancements for enterprises to satisfy the quality standards of the secured markets.

This, he said was undertaken through, among others, branding and marketing collateral to ensure that SMMEs products and services attracted recognition and sales, packaging requirements, which included bar codes, batch numbers and expiry dates, which were essential for traceability in the event of product recalls. 

Other interventions, he said, included product quality certification, which he said was subsidised by up to 85 per cent of the certification costs and availing of monthly flea markets for SMMEs to showcase and sell their products to retailers and the public.

In addition, Mr Gare said advisory services were offered to SMMEs to fulfill requirements from major retailers and access shelf space for their products. 

In the 2019/2020 financial year, SMMEs registered sales amounting to P19.2 million through the said intervention.

He was responding to Mmadinare MP, Mr Molebatsi Molebatsi, who had asked the minister to state if there were any  initiatives at his ministry aimed at promoting  SMMEs in towns and rural areas, especially where they were in competition with big businesses that intended to establish chain stores and other big businesses, if not, the minister should state the reasons. Ends