losses
Glenda Daniels
‘I might be earning cents at the moment, but it’s early days and it’s better than sitting at home and starving,” says thirtysomething single mother Joyce Moemedi, who has joined a small-business project to learn mosaic skills after 10 years of unemployment.
Moemedi, who once had no skills, is now general secretary and representative of Katlego Mosaic Small Business in Klerksdorp.
She heads a group trained as part of the Klerksdorp Development Centre, affiliated to the Mineworkers Development Agency. Here 15 women learn mosaics skills.
This week the agency tabled a proposal for a new centre in Xai Xai to the Gold Producers Forum of the Chamber of Mines.
The Anglo Gold/National Union of Mine- workers (NUM) fund has committed R1,5- million to the project, and the agency is looking for R3,5-million from the new Chamber of Mines fund.
The centre would be based at the The Employment Bureau of Africa facilities in Xai Xai, which is one of the areas agreed on at the mining summit as a pilot area for the rural development components of the mining industry’s social plan. This move can be seen as labour and the industry combining resources to deliver on the plan.
Meanwhile, Moemedi’s and 15 other women’s training took place at a hostel at the Vaal River mine that the agency converted into a training centre and then turned into a business in January.
The group do “mineworker portraits” and also have a thriving logo business. They have done the NUM logo and the agency’s logo, and have also sold quite a few copies of the Anglo Gold logo as well as the Aids consortium logo. They’ve also done table-tops and house numbers, and have had a contract to do mosaics for a local shebeen.
Moemedi says: “We didn’t know we had such skills. We didn’t know we could paint and draw until we started to train and then discovered this. One must get into business but one must be patient, and the orders from Johannesburg are coming. Katlego means success in Sotho, so I think we will soon be very successful.”
Moemedi attributes her skills development and business training to the work of the agency.
The agency, the job-creation wing of the NUM, was created in 1988 but three years ago it became a separate company. Today, due to its successful programmes of self- employment development, it is one of the few financially sustainable organisations in South Africa.
In the face of massive job losses in the mining industry, about 300 000 over the past decade, the agency has developed an integrated programme of support for enterprise development in communities affected by retrenchments, mainly in rural areas and mining towns.
But the scale of the problem is huge with the number of jobs being lost in the mining sector. The agency’s model for the delivery of job creation and enterprise development services into rural communities has already received substantial tripartite support.
In 1997 the Department of Trade and Industry financed a feasibility study into rapid expansion of the agency’s programme, in order for it to reach all the mine areas. This was endorsed by the Gold Crisis Committee (set up by NUM, the Chamber of Mines and the government), and is currently being implemented with funding from a number of mining companies.
The agency’s Mhlala Development Centre won the first national Masakhane Award for Community Initiatives and was also identified by the Department of Constitutional Development as one of the 10 Local Economic Development models.
“In just two years the agency has trained more than 5 000 people to develop enterprises, and while this is only a flash in the pan in terms of job losses, the small business creation has been sustained for the most part,” says chief executive officer Kate Phillip.
In the Eastern Cape 80% of the trainees went into economic activity in the rural areas, and a year later 54% are still in a successful business.
“We think we’ve cracked it. We have seven financially sustainable centres, which is an elusive goal for most developmental agencies,” says Phillip.
How to create economic activity and jobs in the rural areas is probably one of the most challenging considerations in the country today, yet not enough emphasis has been put on this in the national agenda.
A new book, At the Crossroads: Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa into the 21st Century, edited by Ben Cousins, deals with this issue.
The book responds to the challenges and constraints of rural enterprise development. One of the biggest problems remains access to capital, and starter entrepreneurs need starter equipment and access to raw materials. Packing also remains a major issue.
Part of the agency’s function is to identify the gap in the supply chain and fill that – this has been done in Lesotho, with a seedling nursery, and in another centre in Lesotho about 13 400 chickens a month are being produced for 214 entrepreneurial centres. In yet another centre in Lesotho, stone-cutting has been a major success.
Another big rural success story is taking place in the Northern Province, at Mhala. The locally made beer is flying off the shelves and now game parks are being targeted. There is also a partnership with the Northern Province Game Parks.
The agency’s aim now is to introduce more value-added products, which is beginning to happen, for instance the making of recycled paper at Morokweng, North West.
While training options include welding, tyre repair, stone-cutting, candle-making, mosaics, electrical repairs, poultry production, coconut-oil extraction, roof- and floor-making and T-shirt printing, the agency wants to move beyond these traditional modes of small enterprise to the introduction of new technology in local production.