Any crusader for small business in South Africa needs to possess missionary zeal, personal experience in running a small enterprise and a belief that the businesses need not stay small for good.
Wawa Damane, CEO of the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda), brings to her job more than 23 years experience in running small businesses, developing support programmes with academic institutions and working in the area of policy formulation for small businesses.
Seda was formed by bringing together the beleaguered wholesale financier Ntsika, the National Manufacturing Advisory Centre (Namac) and the Community Private-Public Partnership Programme from the Development Bank of Southern Africa
Damane sees Seda intervening in three important ways. First, by “localising entrepreneurial infrastructure”. This by bringing Seda advice centres closer to small businesses, wherever they may be. The agency has set itself the goal of having at least one office in all 284 municipalities within three years, and more than one office in larger municipality districts and metros.
The process was started with the opening of a Seda office in the North West and four more are earmarked for launch by end of the year. This will be complemented by turning existing Namac centres into Seda offices and finally through a fully-fledged roll-out.
Damane would like to see the advice centres operate according to the set minimum-service standard, unlike Seda predecessors where quality of service varied.
The second phase is the actual review of Seda products. Two of its current programmes are franchise learnership and export readiness. The former places interns with various franchises. The latter assists firms, with products that have export potential, to gear up for the challenge of working with foreign currency and monitoring markets around the world.
The third important role that Damane envisages is coordination across the three tiers of government.
She is unfazed by the range of obstacles in Seda’s path to success. These include regulation, found to cost business R70-billion a year — an exorbitant amount that chokes the small business sector. They also include the cost of telecoms, steel and chemical pricing. “Those who point out the cost of regulation are not saying there should be no regulation,” she says, “because that too is costly.” She suggests streamlining administrative processes, simplifying regulation and involving small businesses.
Seda’s broader role, she says, is to act as “the ears for government and champions of small business”, to highlight obstacles to the government through interactions with business associations.
She naturally advocates procurement as a key driver for small business growth, advanced by government departments and big corporations. What she would like to see is more commitment from potential entrepreneurs. But, how do people resign themselves to running a stationery supply company on the basis of one contract? That is where Damane chastises corporates and urges big business to give its smaller counterparts more bites of the cherry.
To achieve her objectives, she has requested a budget of R500-million from the Department of Trade and Industry.
Her own small business experience dates back to more than two decades when, as a Rhodes University graduate, she started a fish and chips shop in KwaZakhele in the Eastern Cape. This was followed by a dry-cleaning store and later Damane set up a small business support programme with the University of Port Elizabeth, which, she is proud to say, is still running.
Whatever her ultimate achievements at Seda, small businesses cannot complain that they never had an empathic champion on their side.